Timberland herbicide spraying sickens a communityhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.19/timberland-herbicide-spraying-sickens-a-community
Companies deposit thousands of pounds of herbicides each year on Oregon forests.

Outside, the October day was gray, the sun having slid off to a better place. The winds, swept aloft by the nearby Pacific Ocean, swirled above the stands of fir trees that rise above the small, clean one-story house. Wright’s uncle, Jack Cox, who lives with him, had a ferocious nosebleed. At the same time, 33 other people, scattered up rabbit-hole roads throughout the valley, suffered in different ways: Strange rashes bloomed on their arms and foreheads, and some victims crouched over the toilet for hours, crippled by sudden diarrhea. Others were struck by nausea, headaches and asthma attacks. Wright, struggling with his own symptoms, was unaware of his neighbors’ troubles. All he knew is that up until the yellow-and-white helicopter flew overhead, he’d felt just fine, working on the carburetor of his ’79 Dodge truck in his front yard.

Keith Wright replaces brakes on a truck in his garage at home in Cedar Valley near Gold Beach, Oregon. Wright was working here last year when herbicides were sprayed across this coastal mountain valley; within a day, he was coughing up blood.

Matt Mills McKnight

Over the next several weeks, local doctors and nurses were mystified by the ailments that plagued members of this coastal town, a picturesque spot nestled at the mouth of the Rogue River, where it empties into the Pacific Ocean. Many people stayed sick, or got even sicker. A horse went blind. One dog died.

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An investigation completed this summer by the Oregon Department of Agriculture reveals that, on the same day last year that Wright tinkered with his truck, Steven Owen, a pilot hired by two timber-stand outfits, Crook Timberlands and Joseph Kaufman, crisscrossed the valley north of Gold Beach where Wright lives. Nozzles on the helicopter doused four recent clear-cuts, and then illegally sprayed surrounding properties with a cocktail of herbicides containing substances such as triclopyr, imazapyr and 2,4-dichlorophenoxyacetic acid, better know as 2,4-D, an ingredient in Agent Orange, the infamous defoliant. Wright knew about Agent Orange; he was a gunner during the Vietnam War, when it was heavily used.

“I never bled through my lungs before in my life,” says Wright, 60, chief of the local fire department. A former logger and commercial fisherman, he once survived for six and a half hours in 43-degree water after his crab boat capsized in the Pacific Ocean. Wright tends to joke about his own suffering, rarely mentioning the 42 pieces of shrapnel in his body or the bullet wounds he got in Vietnam. But as he recounts the spraying incident, he shakes his head.

“The whole thing, it feels like you’re being violated, you know? They (the state and the timber companies) obviously don’t care about us.”

Timber companies hire licensed helicopter pilots to spray hundreds of thousands of pounds of herbicides each year on forests throughout Oregon. Their goal is to kill the weeds, shrubs and trees that compete with the Douglas-fir and other trees harvested by the state’s $20 billion timber industry. These herbicides, which can cause a host of long- and short-term health problems, sometimes drift away from the timber stands and onto nearby communities and into their drinking water sources. Oregon isn’t the only state with this problem. However, its relatively lax regulations, limited oversight, and the proximity of forests to homes throughout the coastal range put Oregonians at the greatest risk.

“People in Oregon are being exposed against their will, and these exposures are routine,” says Richard R. Kauffman, the recently retired Northwest regional director of the Centers for Disease Control’s Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. “Enough of these instances are happening, there should be some changes to state laws.

“But I also see a basic flaw in the (pesticide) regulations we have in this country. Our system is at fault here.”

On a summer morning, fog sinks low in the shallows between forested hills in Oregon’s coastal mountains. Douglas-fir stands stretch for miles, interrupted frequently by brown patches that look as if they’ve been scraped clean by a giant spatula — logging clear-cuts. This is some of the most productive timberland in North America. But people live here, too, in homes and schools, farms and marinas squeezed between the ocean and the tree-covered hills.

Though a clear-cut may look barren, it’s actually home to a vibrant competition for life. Long-dormant seeds buried underground take flight when exposed to the sun. Within months, these opportunistic species, including blackberry, salmonberry, alder and Scotch broom, can cover the ground with a fresh thicket of green, robbing fast-growing Douglas-fir seedlings, the industry’s big moneymaker, of sunlight. Timber companies combatting these weeds require a war-like sensibility and weapons, namely herbicides.

In the 1940s, when Wright’s mother’s family owned a logging company and mill north of Gold Beach, they burned out unwanted species after logging, before replanting trees, but such fires could be risky and didn’t accomplish much. As long as the root systems of brush species survived, plants like salmonberry continued to grow back. So starting in the late ’60s, chemists developed an array of substances designed to destroy specific forest shrubs.

By the time Wright was working logging crews in the late 1980s, he hiked through the woods armed with a hatchet and cans of what he says was a diluted solution of 2,4-D and tobacco. “We didn’t spray all over the ground and into the water. You’d cut into the bark of a tree and douse a little bit of (the herbicide) where you made your cut,” says Wright, staring up at a wax maple that turned bleached as bone after the helicopter flew over it. “A five-man crew could take out a lot of undesirables in a day.”

But the work was slow and dangerous, putting people who trudged across steep slopes at risk of injury from chainsaws and hatchets. Aerial spraying became an attractive alternative.

Today’s timber industry is particularly dependent on spraying by helicopter. About 37 percent of Oregon’s timberland –– 9 million acres –– is privately owned, most of it divided into corporate-owned parcels of at least 5,000 acres apiece. Using ground crews on anything over 100 acres doesn’t make economic sense, says Mike Kroon of the Oregon Department of Forestry. It takes 10 workers an entire day to treat the same acreage that a helicopter can spray in a half hour, while an industrial-grade clear-cut could take months to treat on the ground, without aerial spraying. That’s simply too long and too costly, so the timberland equivalent of crop-dusting is deployed. In 2008, the last year that Oregon tracked spraying, more than 800,000 pounds of herbicide were dropped on the state’s private timberlands. Aerial herbicide spraying is banned on Oregon’s federal lands.

At high concentrations, these herbicides can cause a host of human health problems, from eye and skin irritation to vomiting and diarrhea. A person who drinks 2,4-D is likely to incur kidney failure and skeletal muscle damage, according to the National Pesticide Information Center. But regulatory agencies and timber companies, citing decades of science, insist that at the low concentrations likely to result from aerial spraying drift, most of the herbicides in widespread use are fairly harmless.

“Research can never prove that there’s zero risk, but the EPA requires that these chemicals have an ‘acceptable risk’ when applied correctly,” says Paul Adams, chair of the Oregon Society of American Foresters policy committee. “Some people feel that, until we can prove they won’t ever cause any harm, we shouldn’t use them. At this point, you’re dealing with philosophy, not science.”

Mike Newton, an emeritus Oregon State University professor of forestry who has published nearly 100 scientific articles about the ecology of Douglas-fir and the environmental effects of herbicides, agrees. Forests are sprayed much less frequently than farms are, he says, and so there is much less chance of exposure. “There has been a great deal of effort to do good science; the lay citizen doesn’t have any grasp of what’s gone on here, and they don’t realize that there’s millions and millions of dollars dealing with the safety of these products before they go on the market,” says Newton, 81, patting a Douglas-fir he planted 40 years ago in the 30-acre parcel behind his home in western Oregon.

Over the last decade, however, new findings have called this thinking into question. Atrazine and 2,4-D, two of the most commonly used chemicals in forestry, affect the endocrine system, the hormones and glands that regulate vital functions such as sexual development and behavior, pregnancy and many aspects of childhood development. Prenatal exposures have been linked to low birth weights, according to a 2013 article in Environmental Research. In 2011, an Environmental Protection Agency scientific advisory panel found evidence of a link between atrazine exposure and diseases including ovarian cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and thyroid cancer. And when chemicals are applied in a mix, they can interact, which may lead to more harmful effects than when they’re applied individually, according to a 2009 article in Environmental Health Perspectives.

Such research exacerbates the fears of the residents of Oregon’s Triangle Lake region near Eugene, Oregon, who have worried for decades that their proximity to industrial timberlands and aerial sprays is responsible for their rashes, cancers and other health problems. In 2011, the EPA tested the urine of locals and found atrazine and 2,4-D in every sample. This makes Nancy Webster and her neighbors in Rockaway Beach, Oregon, 150 miles north of Triangle Lake, increasingly nervous about drinking the water that comes out of their taps.

Two summers ago, Nancy Webster sat on her front porch, morning coffee in hand, watching a helicopter spray a fine mist over a private forest about a half-mile away in the Jetty Creek watershed, the source of her town’s water supply. The high school, middle school and a local preschool sit at the base of the forest slope.

“I was horrified. I could smell the chemicals,” says Webster, a soft-spoken baby boomer who retired and moved to the coast six years ago. As was the case at Gold Beach, the timber company did not notify the community prior to spraying, so Webster didn’t set aside any water or shut the windows. The water treatment plant doesn’t filter for herbicides and, with just one day’s worth of storage, it can’t shut down for the several weeks necessary to let the chemicals pass through, as do several treatment plants elsewhere along the coast. “My neighbors and I trade tips about what filters to put on our water. We all look up at the hills and pray we’re not poisoning ourselves.”

On a day when the sky spits rain, Webster and her friend, Judy Coleman, hike into the forest to take a look at the clear-cut above Jetty Creek. The heart-shaped bowl, once home to a creek, is now full of logs and branches strewn like toothpicks in a mud fondue. “That creek feeds the main stem. But because there’s no salmon in the creek, they can log right through it,” says Coleman, a former water-quality specialist with the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality. “It makes no sense at all. Even if there’s no fish in there, that stream flows into the creek below that does have fish in it, that is the source of our drinking water. When it rains like this, everything becomes connected.” The gravel roads that crisscross this forest and most other timberland act as vectors, delivering any herbicides deposited by helicopter into ditches along the roads, which ultimately empty into the streams.

Nancy Webster, a community organizer, stands near Jetty Creek. Runoff from the clear-cut forests that lie above flows into the creek, from which the nearby town of Rockaway Beach, Oregon, gets its water.

Matt Mills McKnight

In 2013, the state Department of Environmental Quality sampled water from the creeks and estuaries of six public watersheds along Oregon’s northern coast. The herbicides atrazine, glyphosate and sulfometuron-methyl were identified in multiple locations, and since municipal water districts don’t filter out herbicides or pesticides, they likely ended up in tap water. The amounts found were far below the levels that would trigger action under the federal Safe Drinking Water Act. But Josh Seeds, a water-quality expert at the DEQ, says that those low levels could result from inadequate testing: Since timber companies aren’t required to tell any agency exactly when they’ll spray, the DEQ wasn’t able to sample for days afterward. During such a delay, chemicals dissipate.

“Most of the herbicides used in forestry move through water quickly. To find anything, you have to be set up for it,” says Seeds. “You have to know when they’re going to spray, and then sample immediately after spraying. And we haven’t been able to do that.”

Testing by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 2011 found imazapyr in the well water at a public school in the Triangle Lake area, west of Eugene. Between 2002 and 2010, the U.S. Geological Survey took samples from Oregon’s McKenzie River Basin, an area dominated by timberland, and found that nearly half of all samples included the herbicides hexazinone, 2,4-D, atrazine and glyphosate, which rank among the most frequently used herbicides in forestry. Here, as along the North Coast, the herbicide concentrations were considered a negligible threat to human health. Yet the majority of the chemicals found are potential endocrine disruptors that the EPA has yet to regulate.

“It doesn’t take very much exposure to these chemicals in our water or air to mess with our hormones,” says Laura Vandenberg, a University of Massachusetts toxicologist who sits on the boards of the scientific journals Reproductive Toxicology and Environmental Health and is an editor of Endocrine Disruptors. “The functional concentrations of hormones in your body are in the parts per billion or parts per trillion. We’re talking about a drop of water in an Olympic-size swimming pool.”

It’s illegal for even a drop of herbicide to drift away from the target areas, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen. Stuart Turner — a one-man “CSI-crops shop” who investigates cases of pesticide misapplication — has seen herbicides drift over six miles from where they were sprayed.

The EPA sets standards for how specific herbicides are applied, determining the likelihood of drift based on industry-produced data using fixed-wing aircraft targeting crops from about 10 feet above flat land in Texas. (Helicopter application is not factored in.) The agency’s own model for drift calculation allows users to input no more than a 20 percent slope, even though coast range slopes are frequently twice that.

And drift is much harder to predict in most Western forests than it is above flat land in Texas or laser-leveled Iowa cornfields. The timber-dusting helicopters along Oregon’s coast fly as high as 80 feet above 40-degree slopes, and torrential rain and unpredictable ocean winds can pull chemicals downslope during application, making it nearly impossible to prevent herbicides from drifting away from their targets. “The pilots are the best in the business, but they’re not 10 feet off the ground like you are in a crop-duster,” says Turner, who chaired the Helicopter Associations’ International Aerial Applications Committee for 13 years. “There’s no doubt you’re getting people being exposed to pesticides against their will.” But neither the EPA nor any state agencies have established a protocol for taking air samples, making it impossible to document the accusations of landowners who report breathing chemicals after seeing a helicopter drop herbicides.

Though herbicide application is in part federally regulated, enforcement and investigation remain primarily up to the states. State pesticide regulatory agencies get most of their funding from chemical manufacturers or distributors that pay to register their products, and from licensing fees paid for by pest-control applicators and dealers. This, combined with the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s dual mandate to both bolster and police the industry, makes for a poor record of investigating cases, critics say.

With only nine field investigators to cover all of Oregon, the agency monitors applications only if asked. “As an investigator, I’m typically following up on complaints,” says Sunny Jones, an Oregon Department of Agriculture pesticide investigator. “We’re not Big Brother. A lot of use goes on that we don’t know about.”

A logging truck comes through Cedar Valley, in Coastal Oregon. Tourism and other industries have replaced logging as the area’s main economic engine.

Matt Mills McKnight

In October, an investigation by the Portland Oregonian found that for six years, state agencies had ignored residents’ reports of herbicide drift in the Rogue River Valley before finally launching the Gold Beach investigation.

That investigation, however, was far from complete, critics say: The investigator didn’t arrive to collect samples and interview affected parties until seven days after the spraying. The agency took vegetation and soil samples, but no water, urine or blood was collected, and the investigator gathered testimony from only four of the approximately 20 households that reported being directly impacted. Initially, the helicopter pilot, Stephen Owen, said he sprayed only glyphosate, the main ingredient in Roundup. Less than two weeks after he sprayed, however, the agency discovered other chemicals, including 2,4-D, triclopyr and other herbicides, in vegetation samples. But community members weren’t given this information for another six months, delaying proper medical treatment for those who had gotten sick.

In August this year, 10 months after the incident, the department fined Owen and the company he owns, Pacific Air Research Inc., $10,000 each, for providing false and misleading information to agency inspectors. Owen may lose his operating license as well; the punishment, however, will ultimately be decided at an administrative hearing before a state judge, during which “anything is open to negotiation,” says Dale Mitchell, program manager of the Oregon Department of Agriculture’s enforcement division. In September, the EPA fined Pacific Air Research an additional $1,500 for illegally spraying two herbicides in a way that caused them to come into contact with people.

The $10,000 fines, if they hold, are significantly higher than those typically levied by the state agency. (The most recent available data, from 2012, shows that the agency issued fines ranging from $204 to $962 each for various misapplications of pesticides.) The people of Gold Beach, however, remain unimpressed.

“At this point, I’ve put out $30,000 in health care and vet bills, so (the fine) is pretty much a drop in the bucket,” says Kathryn Rickard, a daughter and granddaughter of loggers, a former hairdresser and mother of five, who developed rashes on her arms, flu-like symptoms and an instant headache after standing on her porch a few hours after the helicopter flew over her house. Her dog became sick with a wasting disease that she blames on the spraying; it later died. “I’m pro-logging — I know chemicals have their place, if used appropriately — but I’m angry. I was sprayed against my will.”

Kathryn Rickard stands at the gravesite of her dog, which died after being exposed to drift from spraying of a forest two miles from her home in Cedar Valley, Oregon. Rickard, too, felt the effects: A few hours after she heard the helicopter overhead, she went out on her deck, and there was “the most horrid smell, heavy stinging sensation that gave me an instant headache and nausea.” Her arms broke out in a rash that resembled tiny pinpricks. “We don’t have any faith in our government at this point. I don’t feel that they are helping us to be safe.”

Matt Mills McKnight

Rickard’s ability to sue in response is limited. In Oregon, as in Washington and Colorado, the law insulates herbicide and pesticide applicators from liability for damages incurred by neighbors. If a neighboring landowner sues and then loses, she’s on the hook for the opposition’s attorney fees, which can run upwards of $100,000. But the Gold Beach incident might lead to change. In early August, Chris Winter of the Crag Law Center, a Portland-based public interest law firm, filed suit on behalf of Rickard and 16 other Gold Beach residents, asking a state judge to declare portions of the Oregon Right to Farm and Forest law unconstitutional. If the judge finds in their favor, citizens such as Rickard could sue the timber companies for property damages without being on the hook for defendant’s legal fees.

Beyond the courts, a coalition of regional environmental nonprofits, private timber owners and public health advocates is working to lobby the Oregon Legislature for reform. The coalition has several demands: It wants Oregon to adopt a formal application process for all use of herbicide sprays on private and state lands, and it asks thatpesticide applicators file publicly available records of where and what they sprayed within 24 hours of application. In addition, it wants the names of the sprayed chemicals turned over to the Poison Control Center so that doctors can treat patients in a timely fashion. The group also wantsOregon to follow Washington’s example and establish buffer zones to prevent spraying within 200 feet of surface water, homes and schools.

“How many more people have to get sick before we do something about this?” says Lisa Arkin, executive director of Beyond Toxics, an Oregon-based nonprofit. People from 11 Oregon counties have reported getting sick from aerial spraying, says Arkin. “The fact that earnest and truthful complaints from communities in Oregon and other states have fallen on deaf ears is unacceptable and outrageous.”

In late May, the Oregon Senate Committee on Energy and the Environment, following a hearing on the Gold Beach case, asked the state agencies involved to develop protocols to better respond to future spray emergencies. The committee met again in September, and lawmakers say they may push for stricter policies in the upcoming legislative session.

But getting them passed could be an uphill battle. The timber industry in Oregon contributed $4.4 million to state campaigns over the last four elections — two and a half times more than the oil and gas industry, and 25 times more than the dairy industry. And rural legislators are worried about the impact of policy changes on forestry jobs, says Sen. Michael Dembrow, D, head of the state Senate Energy and Environment Committee. “The question is how can we affect the practice (of herbicide spraying) in a way that harms the industry the least while protecting people’s health the most,” says Dembrow.

In the interim, Ecotrust, a regional economic development organization, is looking for ways to help communities protect their watersheds from potential sources of contamination, including aerial spraying. It’s helping the community of Carbonado, Washington, near Mount Rainier, work out a voluntary agreement to halt spraying in the most sensitive areas of its municipal water source, which lie on forest land not owned by the city. In the future, the town hopes to pay the timber company to minimize exposure to additional areas by using backpack sprayers instead of helicopters.

The spraying issue has caused some division in the small town of Gold Beach; some of those who have spoken out against the timber industry have complained about feeling threatened, and ugly quotes have appeared in local news stories. Keith Wright has helped form a telephone tree so that in the event of an emergency, neighbors can quickly come to each other’s aid. In June, Wright received a form letter from the state Department of Agriculture stating that it planned to investigate his lung damage; he says that an ear, nose and throat specialist in Coos Bay has ascribed his bleeding and cough to his exposure to the aerial spray. At the time, he felt optimistic. “I hope somehow I play some little part in getting them to stop spraying everywhere,” he said.

But by this fall, having heard nothing from the department since the letter, his hope was subdued.

Last spring, a state agency erroneously reported that Wright had died following the spray incident; he only found out when a mortuary called his house to make funeral arrangements. Almost a year after the spraying, a wicked cough continues to trouble him, but he still tries to have a good laugh when he can. Today, someone calls to ask how he is. “I’m alive,” he replies. “Are you?”

Award-winning journalist Rebecca Clarren, a former HCN editor, writes about public health and the environment from Portland, Oregon.

This story was funded with reader donations to the High Country News Research Fund.

UPDATE: The sentence of this story, which originally read, "Last spring, the Department of Agriculture erroneously reported that Wright had died," was updated after officials from the Department of Agriculture insisted that it was not that agency which informed the mortuary of Wright's "death." The mortuary staff was unable to confirm exactly which state agency delivered the erroneous information.

]]>No publisherPollutionNorthwestOregonWaterAgricultureU.S. Forest ServiceForestsCommunities2014/11/10 05:00:00 GMT-6ArticlePhotographs of the Gold Beach communityhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/46.19/timberland-herbicide-spraying-sickens-a-community/photos-from-the-gold-beach-community
The people affected by this herbicide cocktail.]]>No publisher2014/11/10 05:00:00 GMT-6Sidebar BlurbFarming's Toxic Legacyhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.21/farmings-toxic-legacy
Long-banned pesticides linger in the soils of neighborhoods built on former agricultural land in central Washington.This story is accompanied by two sidebars: Backyard poisons and How to play safely in the soil.

YAKIMA, WASHINGTON

Nothing about the quiet summer morning suggests a reason to worry. Two-year-old Kian plays happily in the dirt of the empty lot where his family's new house will eventually stand. Nearby, his mother, Tara Compton, points out interesting "buggies," and when he toddles down the steep hillside, she holds his hand. Dust rises from the soil as though from a phantom stampede, and dirt covers the little boy's hands and face.

"This is where I plan to grow our garden," says Compton, pointing to a wide plot of earth near a peach tree that yields delicious fruit. She's pregnant, but with her tall, strong build, it hardly shows. "It's important to me to grow a lot of our own vegetables because it's so hard to know what's in the food you buy at the store."

Compton, a 38-year-old intensive care nurse, is a conscientious mother. She buys organic produce, filters her water, and uses lotions and sunscreens that are paraben-free. Compton and her husband, Ron, who's studying to become a teacher, chose Yakima out of a host of Western cities largely because of the nearby hiking and camping opportunities. Yet despite the natural beauty and the good, clean living, their new home hides a potential threat to her children -- one that Compton is hard-pressed to control.

Some 30 years ago, this upper-middle-class neighborhood, with its two-story brick houses and generous views of Mount Adams, was all orchards and farmland. In this way, Yakima resembles many communities. Over the past 28 years, more than 5.5 million acres of former farmland in the West have been plowed under and transformed into subdivisions, schools and parks. But even though the apple trees and cotton fields are long gone, they can leave a hidden toxic legacy.

Throughout much of the 20th century, farmers in Yakima and across the country blanketed crops with now-banned pesticides, including lead arsenate and a suite of long-lasting, synthetic organic compounds laced with chlorine, such as DDT, dieldrin, toxaphene and chlordane. Today, decades after they were sprayed, these compounds and their breakdown products often persist in the soil.

That doesn't necessarily mean they're harming people; in many places, the levels are likely negligible. There are no immediate health effects associated with exposure to these chemicals in the soil. And existing research indicates that the known health risks of living on former agricultural lands are relatively low -- especially where the soil has been capped with a grassy lawn. Still, children who are exposed regularly over a long time period to contaminated dirt through direct contact -- perhaps by playing in it or gardening or eating vegetables grown in it -- may develop cancer or other health problems decades later, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.

Washington state has decided that low risk is not the same as no risk. Since 2006, it has spent close to $7 million removing soil from 20 elementary schoolyards in the central part of the state, wherever lead and arsenic, the primary components of lead arsenate, exceeded levels set by the state to protect human health. The project -- which includes some Yakima schools -- is unique in the West.

Washington state's Department of Ecology is cleaning up schoolyards in the central part of the state where it found unsafe levels of lead and arsenic. These hazardous elements are likely remnants from pesticides sprayed when the area was farmland. This map shows schools that have had their contaminated soil removed and replaced (green markers), and those that have not yet been cleaned up (brown markers.) Zoom out to see data for Wenatchee and other areas of Central Washington.

Because the dangers posed by legacy pesticides are insidious and poorly understood, agencies and advocacy groups have focused on more obvious threats. Neither the federal government nor any Western state requires testing the soil prior to development of privately owned farmland, leaving the burden on landowners like the Comptons. Meanwhile, real estate agents say it's the buyers' responsibility, not theirs, to find out about possible pesticide contamination. A survey of over 20 national environmental groups, including ones that focus on pesticides, reveals that none are working to change this dynamic.

"As a nation, we're flying blind on this issue," says John Wargo, Yale University professor of environmental risk analysis and policy. "The Environmental Protection Agency is so overwhelmed by new chemicals and managing the changing science on existing chemicals that are licensed that they're interpreting the ban (on legacy pesticides) as having solved the problem. That's shortsighted. We're not even asking questions, we're not doing the testing, and the result is people are being exposed without their knowledge and certainly without their consent."

A hundred years ago, land speculators lured people to plant orchards in the Yakima area with promises that "here fortunes grow on trees." Hand-colored postcards from that era depict row after row of verdant orchards, neat fields and two-story white-painted homes. Ads in East Coast newspapers touted Yakima as the "orchard city," where "ten acres in fruit makes a man independent for life."

But that abundance did not come naturally. It relied on pesticides like lead arsenate, which helped control insects like the codling moth, an apple-loving scourge that thrives in the West's arid climate. "Without lead arsenate, there would be no industry," says Frank Peryea, professor emeritus of soil science at Washington State University and one of the nation's foremost experts on arsenical pesticides. At the university's tree fruit research center in Wenatchee, a few hours north of Yakima, Peryea snaps a small unripe apple from a tree and slices it open with a pocketknife. These trees have not been treated with modern pesticides or pheromones, which disrupt the moths' mating cycle. Where the white flesh of the apple should be is a crater filled with the moth larvae's black excrement. "You want to eat that?" Peryea asks dryly.

Nope. Neither did consumers in the early 1900s. When researchers first introduced lead arsenate, farmers quickly became hooked on it, using handgun sprayers to coat apples, potatoes, cotton, cherries and other crops. Not only did the U.S. Department of Agriculture recommend spraying crops, but if growers didn't do so, state pest control boards in Oregon, Washington and California would spray for them -- and charge the farmers for the effort, put a lien against their land, or even remove their trees. As early as 1915, the bugs had developed some resistance; farmers responded by spraying more. In 1941, U.S. farmers sprayed more than 60 million pounds of lead arsenate.

Then, in the late 1940s, American farmers abandoned their old standby in favor of DDT, then hailed as the savior of mankind. By the early '70s, an estimated 1.35 billion pounds of DDT had been sprayed in the U.S. -- enough to fill more than 238 Olympic-size swimming pools. But public outcry against the pesticide began building after the 1962 publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which reported that DDT accumulates in living tissue in greater and greater concentrations as it moves up the food chain. Soon, other scientists linked the chemical with the near extinction of many birds. Several notable studies, presented to the nascent EPA, showed that DDT could cause cancer in humans. The EPA banned the chemical in the U.S. in 1972, and by 1990 had followed suit with lead arsenate and most other organochlorine pesticides.

Unfortunately, the very thing that made organochlorine pesticides like DDT effective for a long period of time also makes them hard to get rid of. Because chlorine binds strongly to other elements, the compounds are stable and do not break down easily. Organochlorines also bind to organic matter in soil, and to the fat cells of the organisms that consume it. When they eventually do degrade, they can break down into other toxic compounds. Lead arsenate, meanwhile, is composed of lead and arsenic, the party lingerers of the elements. Neither breaks down over time. They also bind to organic matter in the soil and don't dissolve readily in water, so rain can't easily wash them away. All of these chemicals can remain in the top 12 to 18 inches of the ground for decades -- perhaps even hundreds of years.

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Though no one has comprehensively sampled Western soils for legacy pesticides, during the 1990s, the U.S. Geological Survey looked at streambeds and fish across the nation, including every Western state. In watersheds where more than 50 percent of the land was in agriculture, DDT and its breakdown products, DDD and DDE, were present in sediment at half the sampled sites as well as in the tissue of 90 percent of sampled fish. Dieldrin was present in sediment in 17 percent of the sampled sites and in 63 percent of the fish. And while levels of both pesticides in fish tissue have dropped by 50 percent since they were banned for agricultural use in the '70s, research published in the past five years shows that this trend has flat-lined for DDT in some lakes. It could be that a certain amount of the compound is not degrading, or there may be continuing input of DDT from the atmosphere or watershed.

The fact that these chemicals persist in the environment means they're still finding their way into our bodies. DDT, dieldrin and other organochlorine pesticides are commonly found in the fatty tissues, and even in the breast milk, of people throughout the country, including those born decades after the compounds were banned.

People can be exposed to these toxic chemicals through the water and air, or through touching or ingesting them in soil and food. Long-term, chronic exposure to various organochlorine pesticides is associated with damage to the central nervous system, liver, kidney and thyroid. The EPA classifies all as probable carcinogens; many are suspected endocrine disruptors, which mimic or block hormones that regulate metabolism and neurological and sexual development, and can cause various ailments.

Long-term exposure to lead arsenate, meanwhile, may elevate the level of lead in the blood, which is associated with learning and behavioral problems. Ingesting arsenic -- most of the research has been done on people exposed through drinking water -- can cause bladder, lung, liver, prostate and kidney cancers. Simply touching inorganic arsenic, however, does little more than irritate the skin, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

Because their bodies are small and still developing, children, especially in the womb, are most vulnerable to the harmful effects of chemicals. They're also more likely to be exposed, since kids love to play in the dirt and toddlers put everything in their mouths, including soil.

But it is impossible to predict whether a particular individual will get sick. So the EPA has projected the risk for an entire population, setting screening levels based on how much of a specific chemical, over an exposure period of 30 years, will cause no more than one person in 1 million to develop cancer. State and federal agencies can use these levels when considering cleanup of contaminated areas. But the standards aren't enforceable; there's no law saying that soil can't contain X amount of a particular compound. Nor does the EPA have any department or staff to deal with mitigating threats posed by legacy pesticides in converted farmland. The agency does, however, investigate and oversee cleanup of indisputably and severely contaminated land. And last month, the EPA released a draft of its guidelines for locating new schools to protect children from environmental hazards. Though the document does suggest that sampling for banned pesticides in the soil of proposed school sites may be appropriate, it's not required and doesn't apply to existing schools.

"We've done our job, we've cancelled these pesticides," says a staffer in the EPA's Office of Pesticide Programs, who spoke on condition of anonymity. The agency lacks a mandate from Congress to assess potentially toxic products once they are removed from commerce, the staffer explained. "We know they're hanging around but there is nothing further we can do."

Without federal leadership, most Western states are caught in a bizarre catch-22. Because there are no acute toxic effects from contaminated soil -- because kids aren't eating dirt and getting immediately, obviously sick -- people are not necessarily even aware of the old pesticides in their backyards. But unless homeowners complain or state legislatures mandate action, state agencies say that they can't devote resources to the problem, especially given the long list of more pressing toxic threats. All of this makes it even harder to raise the public awareness that might lead to the allocation of funds for cleaning up contaminated soil.

Washington is an exception; so is California, which requires the evaluation of soil for pesticides at any school using state funds for construction. Washington, Oregon and California have guidance documents that recommend residential developers hire environmental consultants to evaluate potential agricultural contaminants before building. But all are voluntary. No Western state mandates testing. And while some states have catchall requirements to disclose known contamination, only Colorado, Arizona, Washington and Nevada specifically require sellers to disclose legacy pesticide contamination if they find it, according to state agencies. Some environmental consultants who spoke off the record say they've seen sellers avoid soil testing because they'd rather drop the asking price on property than incur potential liability. However, state environmental agencies say the lack of oversight and public awareness probably isn't a problem, because the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. has required banks to evaluate potential pollution when reviewing loan applications for new development since 1993.

But banks may have been an imperfect safety net, especially during the recent housing boom, says Richard Renken, banks and trusts program manager for the Oregon Division of Finance and Corporate Securities, a state agency. "If Bank A wants an environmental assessment done, with all those extra costs, while the bank down the street just wants a property appraisal and the costs are lower (there), where do you think a developer will go?" asks Renken. "Plus, if someone wants a loan for an existing single family home that's 15 years old, even if 35 years ago someone sprayed DDT on it, it's already been long in a different use. No one's going to look."

Due to this collision of factors, the Comptons had no idea that their property had been an orchard until a neighbor told them. "I don't know what to do now," Tara Compton says. "I've been working in the soil and especially since I'm pregnant -- what have I been doing that could affect this baby?"

----

The clank and moan of chains knocking against tetherball poles provides a lonely soundtrack for the empty playground at Yakima's Hoover Elementary. Near a sign that urges kids to "Read More this Summer," the monkeybars emerge from bare dirt. Pink ribbon flutters around exposed sprinkler heads, and off to the side of a soccer goal sits a two-story mountain of dirt covered with black plastic and sandbags. In the soil underneath the tarp are levels of arsenic nearly four times Washington's threshold for requiring cleanup; there's lead there, too, at nearly three times the threshold.

Over the past five years, Washington's Department of Ecology has overseen remediation of 20 out of the 35 schools in the central part of the state where lead and arsenic levels exceed state cleanup standards. Here, construction crews are removing 1,135 tons of soil to be taken to a local landfill. By the time school resumes this fall, they will have put a barricade of geotextile fabric on the bare ground and capped it with clean dirt and grass sod. The price tag for just this one school: $239,000.

"That's an expensive lawn," says Mark Dunbar of the state's Department of Ecology as he picks up a long-buried white-and-blue marble from the denuded playground, reminding me to wash my hands after I touch it. "But what's the cost of just one cancer treatment these days? It's cheap insurance compared to that."

Even here, though, the scope of inquiry is limited. The Ecology Department decided to test only for lead and arsenic in schoolyards, rather than DDT and other legacy pesticides, because it's cheaper and because the agency didn't want to overwhelm the public, says Valerie Bound, the agency's regional section manager for toxic cleanup.

"When you know it's an old orchard, how far do you want to open the door? Once you have the lab results, you can't really ignore them," says Bound. "The scope of the problem is so large. You can't really clean everything up. You just have to prioritize."

The tests are expensive -- $100 to screen for a suite of pesticides and $20 per heavy metal, such as lead or arsenic. The cost underscores how difficult it is for homeowners to discover what might be lurking in their soil, since doing so requires separate tests of multiple samples from different places around their yards.

A composite of five soil samples taken from the Comptons' yard by High Country News revealed levels of DDE, a DDT breakdown product, at 0.6 parts per million -- roughly half of the EPA's cancer risk threshold -- and arsenic at 4.7 ppm, seven times the safe level in Washington and 67 times the levels recommended by California's environmental health agency. This is fairly normal in central Washington, where background levels of naturally-occurring arsenic are 5 ppm. Still, that's not much consolation for a pregnant mother. And because the samples taken were combined and tested as one owing to the cost, the pesticide levels are only an average of the sampled sites. So now the Comptons have new questions: Are there hotspots in their yard where pesticides exceed safe levels, perhaps due to a spill or an old storage area? Or is most of the yard relatively clean?

"This is worrisome," says Compton, after she receives the test results; it's late summer, and she and her son have been digging in the dirt for days. Even though the test came back within a zone deemed safe by government experts, she worries that future standards will be much stricter. Already California has set levels that are far more protective, based on the most recent research. (See "Backyard poisons?" this page.) So Compton has decided to be proactive, within reason. The only failsafe solution -- removing the topsoil -- runs a prohibitive $950,000 an acre. Instead, next spring Compton will build raised garden beds, line them with an impermeable barrier and fill them with clean soil. (See "How to play safe in the soil," facing page.)

Set against the onslaught of toxic chemicals in our world, legacy pesticides are just another problem to contend with. Possible threats lurk everywhere, from the kitchen-sink cabinet filled with household cleaners to the flame retardant-impregnated mattresses in the bedrooms. "I can't live my life completely freaked out about these things," Compton says. "You can only protect your kids, and yourself for that matter, from so much. You're always going to be living with a certain amount of uncertainty."

Even so, the urge to protect is strong. On a warm summer night, Compton and 13 other moms hover around a picnic table at Yakima's Franklin Park. It's piled high with baking soda, apple cider vinegar and vegetable glycerin.

"I know we all want to do something, to take action," Suzanne Noble, a local special-ed teacher, tells the small group, which meets monthly to discuss how to reduce their kids' exposure to toxic chemicals. Today's lesson, taught by Noble, is on how to make your own cleaning products.

Children bounce in and out of their mother's laps, distracted by the Fisher-Price toys scattered on the ground. Two little girls race each other across the grass, their hair flying in their eyes. They stop at the finish line -- a pine tree -- and roll down a slight incline, holding their bodies as straight as Tootsie Pops. At the bottom of the hill, one of them wipes her face, smearing mud and snot, and laughs into the evening.

This story is funded in part by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism and by contributors to the High Country News Enterprise Journalism Fund.

]]>No publisherGrowth & Sustainability2010/12/13 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleHow to Play Safely in the Soilhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/42.21/how-to-play-safe-in-the-soil
High Country News offers tips on how to garden safely if your home is built on at-risk former farmland.This is a sidebar to the feature story, Pesticides from Old Farmland Leave Toxic Legacy

If you live in an at-risk neighborhood, do not garden in or till the onsite soil.

Build containers or raised garden beds that are at least 12 inches high, line them with an impermeable barrier and fill with soil that your local lawn store or gravel pit has verified as tested and "clean." (Unfortunately, there's nothing like an organic certification for soil.)

If you don't garden in raised beds/containers, avoid growing vegetables that can absorb toxic chemicals from the soil -- such as cucumbers, squash, pumpkins and other cucurbits -- or stick to ornamental plants.

Wash all vegetables before eating.

Keep exposed soil moist to prevent airborne dust.

When you're gardening, do not eat, smoke, drink or engage in other activities that might get soil in your mouth.

Or you could just wear a hazmat suit and move around the yard in a lunar module.

]]>No publisherGrowth & Sustainability2010/12/06 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBackyard poisons? http://www.hcn.org/issues/42.21/backyard-poisons
Soil samples from the yards of two Yakima families showed intriguing but not always comforting results.This is a sidebar to the feature story, Pesticides from Old Farmland Leave Toxic Legacy.

Amanda Ryder and her family live two blocks from Robertson Elementary, one of many Yakima schools that required cleanup due to the high levels of lead and arsenic in its soil. The orchard that contaminated the school's playground once extended across Ryder's backyard, where she now grows vegetables and her sons play in their homemade fort: a dirt hole covered with plywood. Ryder has worried that her family's soil might be tainted, but other expenses have taken precedence over testing.

So HCN decided to help Ryder as well as Tara Compton, whose family plans to build a home on land where another Yakima orchard stood in the 1980s. At Ryder's house, which was built in the 1940s, I used a trowel to collect one cup of dirt from the top eight inches of soil in the vegetable garden, another from the fort, and a final sample from beneath a swing set. Using the same methods, I collected samples from five places on the vacant lot where Compton's family will soon build a house -- including one near an empty, rusty barrel, its former contents unknown, another by a peach tree, and another from the spot that Tara Compton turned into a garden plot this past summer.

Apex Laboratories in Portland, Ore., created a composite for each yard before testing, mixing together pinches of dirt from each sample, as is standard in the industry. Below are the results along with the levels deemed safe by various state and federal agencies. If exposure occurs above those levels, officials say there is increased risk of getting sick.

]]>No publisherGrowth & Sustainability2010/12/06 01:00:00 GMT-6ArticleDairy injuries and deaths 2003-2009 http://www.hcn.org/issues/41.15/dairy-injuries-and-deaths-2003-2009
Dairy work is dangerous, but lax laws and reporting requirements make it difficult to tell how many people are hurt or killed in dairies each year.At least 18 people died working in Western dairies between 2003 and 2009; many more were injured. This list of deaths and injuries, compiled from state and federal safety agency reports, is certainly incomplete, thanks to loopholes and differences in state and federal reporting requirements as well as underreporting by workers. When possible, supplementary information was culled from news stories and coroner’s and sheriff’s reports. Dollar amounts reflect fines, if any. Some fines in the cases listed here were not directly related to the accidents; on occasion, investigators issued citations for unrelated safety violations —Rebecca Clarren

At first, there was neither pain nor fear, only an unfamiliar warmth flooding his chest. Then he remembered the cow and her kicking back leg. Then he realized how hard it was to see.

He woke up lying on the rubber mat on the dusty floor of the dairy where he works. It was 4:30 in the morning, and he had been at work since 5 the night before. The sweet and putrid smell of cow manure laced the air. As he waited half an hour for his boss to come take him to the hospital, he pressed a towel to his face, stared at the blood pooled on his white T-shirt. His head felt as though it might burst. He told himself that it was only a cut, but he had never felt pain like this before.

Later, he learned that his face was broken in three places. The doctors put a metal plate beneath his left eye. Now, four years later, he explains in Spanish through a translator that the plate is slipping. His eye burns, especially in the heat. He can't see well without glasses.

He is afraid to tell his story without the shield of a different name, so let's call him Gustavo. Like many of the immigrants who work in the West's dairies, he lives here illegally. He thinks about how easy it would be for his bosses to fire him and replace him with one of the other immigrants who come here daily looking for work. He has three young children and a wife to support, as well as his parents and siblings back in Peru.

"It's a job with lots of risks. If I had papers, man, there's no way I'd be working in a dairy. But in this town, this is the best job I can get," he says, sagging into his kitchen chair, exhausted after his 12-hour shift. When he smiles, a quick, almost apologetic smile, his left eye looks slightly lopsided. A jagged purple scar mars the base of his cheek. "Every worker I know says they've been kicked or stepped on by a cow. It's common. But one day (the cows) might break your bones, or maybe even kill you."

Milk may have a wholesome commercial image, but the dairies that produce most of the nation's supply aren't always healthy places to work. Dairy workers are injured at a much higher rate than other workers in the U.S.: Between 2004 and 2007, nearly seven of every 100 dairy workers were hurt annually on average, compared to 4.5 out of 100 for all private industries. Beyond using tractors and heavy farming equipment, dairy workers interact with large, unpredictable farm animals — work that ranks among the most hazardous of all occupations, according to a 2007 article in Epidemiology. Plus, they breathe air laced with bacteria and manure dust, putting them at risk for long-term respiratory disease.

Data culled by High Country News show that at least 18 people died in Western dairies between 2003 and 2009 (see sidebar for a state-by-state list, with links to original accident reports and investigations). They were killed in tractor accidents, suffocated by falling hay bales, crushed by charging cows and bulls and asphyxiated by gases from manure lagoons and corn silage. Others survived but lost limbs or received concussions and spent days in the hospital. However, it's difficult to form an accurate picture of the dangers lurking in dairies because the data are incomplete. Due in part to lobbying by the powerful agricultural industry, the reporting requirements for employers are full of holes, and state and federal laws prevent safety agencies from investigating injuries and deaths in certain cases. Meanwhile, dairy workers themselves are often too afraid to speak up.

The majority of the West's nearly 50,000 dairy workers are immigrants, according to U.S. Department of Agriculture sociologist William Kandel. Many of them are undocumented, monolingual Spanish speakers like Gustavo. Such workers are unlikely to report injuries or file claims with the state for money to recover medical bills and missed pay for fear of getting fired or deported. Though Gustavo himself filed a claim without incident, he knows five workers who went to the hospital with injuries, filed claims and were fired. One former coworker's ankle was stomped on by a cow, and he still can't walk despite several surgeries. Gustavo's cousin was attacked by a bull, and despite the screws now holding his shoulder together, he can no longer milk cows or pick crops and is unemployed.

To make matters worse, federal labor laws that protect workers in other industries and give them a voice don't cover dairy workers; state oversight and inspections can be as weak as skim milk. In the Yakima Valley, where Gustavo works, there are virtually no labor advocacy organizations. And with the dairy industry facing some of its hardest economic times in recent history, its workers may be more vulnerable than ever before.

"If you're undocumented, you won't complain. You won't ask for extra water or a shade break or to not do a task you think is dangerous. These things lead to workplace injuries," says Marc Schenker, director of the Western Center for Agricultural Health and Safety in Davis, Calif., which is funded by the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health. "Their injuries aren't inevitable; they're the failure of our system to do the right thing. It's not only an injustice but a tragedy."

Around 40 years ago, most American dairies were fairly small operations, according to a report co-authored by Jim MacDonald, a U.S. Department of Agriculture economist. They kept an average of 19 cows that ate grass from nearby pastures and were milked once or twice a day by family members or locals. These days, technological advancements such as more sophisticated automated milking systems have allowed dairies to vastly increase in size and to lower their costs per pound of milk produced. Consumers have been the primary beneficiaries of these advancements, as the changes have kept the cost of milk and dairy products low.

Nowhere in the country has it been easier for dairies to expand than in the West, with its relatively cheap rural land. As of 2007, the average Western dairy had 550 cows — about five times the national average. And around 80 dairies in the West each have at least 5,000 cows, according to MacDonald. To increase milk production and make it easier to get that many cows in and out of milking parlors two or three times a day, most Western dairies now keep the animals in huge pens or sprawling open-air sheds and feed them a high-protein diet of corn, soybeans, grain and alfalfa, much of it purchased instead of grown at the farm. California, not Wisconsin, is now the biggest milk producer in the country. And Idaho, New Mexico and Washington have drawn new dairies like manure draws flies; today, the three are also among the nation's top 10 states for milk production. Nowadays, with 39 percent of the country's 9.1 million milking cows, the West produces 41 percent of America's milk, which is then processed to make various kinds of milk, cheese and other dairy products. And immigrants, who are willing to work for less money than locals, now make up a large proportion of the staff.

All 14 of the employees where Gustavo works are immigrants; Gustavo says only three of them are documented. The dairy's 750 cows sleep and eat outside on hard dirt in six outdoor corrals that stretch the length of seven city blocks. Their large brown-and-white bodies bump against the metal bars, creating an eerie and arrhythmic melody.

Before his injury, Gustavo and a coworker would open one of the corrals and whack the cows on their backs to funnel them into the concrete milking parlor. Once inside, Gustavo would douse each cow's udders with disinfectant iodine and fit rubber hoses onto its teats, connecting them to the air-sucking milking machine. After 10 or 11 hours on his feet, Gustavo says he tended to feel less agile and less able to watch for the kicking back leg of a touchy cow. His face was often just six inches from the animal's rear, and then as now there were no bars to protect the workers from the cows.

Now, Gustavo is afraid to milk, so he feeds and tends to the dairy's calves. The pay is slightly better, but Gustavo says he still doesn't get rest breaks. He eats lunch while working, removing a manure-laden glove to shove a taco into his mouth. When he feels tired, which is every day, he thinks about his three kids.

Like most dairy workers, Gustavo is salaried, which sounds good until you consider his schedule. Gustavo pulls his neatly folded pay stub from his wallet. He makes $1,175 every two weeks. He works 10- to 12-hour days, with one day off every five days, and receives no overtime pay. That pencils out to about $8 to $10 per hour, which is around the national average for dairy workers, according to industry reports. When Gustavo first arrived in the area 11 years ago, he and his boss discussed only pay, not hours, and he was too happy to have a job to ask any questions. But now he feels he's at his boss's mercy, and he is all too aware that long hours make a dangerous job even more dangerous.

This is all perfectly legal. Even though dairies have modernized, some of the key labor laws governing the industry remain unchanged, still geared to the days when dairies had few employees beyond family members.

Dairy workers, like all agricultural employees, are exempt from the provisions for overtime pay in the Fair Labor Standards Act. Though dairy operators are required to pay at least minimum wage, they are exempt from another federal law that requires employers to report hours on employee pay-stubs. That makes it tough to enforce the law or prove wage violations, says Oregon Law Center labor lawyer Mark Wilk, who over the past decade has represented several hundred Oregon dairy workers who didn't make minimum wage.

As a final slash in the safety net of federal labor law, dairy workers, like all agricultural workers, are exempt from the National Labor Relations Act, which requires employers to negotiate with labor unions over salaries and work conditions and protects workers who try to form unions from being punished. Without this law — the Magna Carta of American labor — dairy workers cannot form a union unless their boss is willing to recognize it and they have little legal recourse if they get fired for trying to organize.

"Dairy folks are legally in the worst of all worlds. There really is no federal law at all to protect them," says Wilk. "This is the last bastion of feudalism. The ugly reality of the world that my clients live in is shocking."

Furthermore, the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration, the national agency responsible for workplace health, doesn't regulate dairies and farms with 10 or fewer employees. For larger operations, federal OSHA requires employers to report and investigates only in the event of a fatality or if three or more employees are hospitalized due to the same accident. States either rely on the feds to regulate industries, or use their own agency, which gives them the option of developing more rigorous regulations and enforcing them with state money. However, the only states in the West that have adopted their own stricter standards are Washington, Oregon and California. (Arizona uses state money to investigate small farms, but only if someone dies.) Inspectors in these states can investigate dairies and farms of any size, and they require employers to contact them if any injury requires a worker to be hospitalized overnight.

Last year, federal and state labor inspectors in the West inspected 42 of the region's approximately 4,150 dairies. While both federal OSHA and state agencies step up inspections for industries that are considered dangerous, no state in the West targets dairies because officials receive relatively few complaints from dairy workers.

That's because complaining is too risky, says a dairy worker from Grandview, Wash., who spoke on condition of anonymity. Because inspectors conduct most of their interviews on site, workers fear retaliation or the loss of their jobs if they say anything. Often, their bosses are the ones who orchestrate the inspections.

"(The manager) would know when the inspectors were going to come, and they would tell us what to say," the worker says in Spanish. "Everything needed to be perfect that day. They will threaten you. You want to keep your job, so you have to do this. For me, this job's important because it's all year long. You can make twice as much working in the dairy as in the fields."

Other dangerous industries, such as meatpacking, logging and construction, have specific safety standards mandated by state or federal labor agencies. While dairies fall under the general agricultural safety regulations for tractors and heavy machinery, there are no specific standards for how workers should be protected while milking or moving cows. Dairy workers in Washington, Nevada, Oregon and California are entitled to lunch and rest breaks, but legal aid organizations in these states say the laws are rarely enforced. The state of Washington has not fined any dairies for failing to provide rest breaks, at least not in recent history, according to Rich Ervin, the Washington Department of Labor and Industry's program manager for Employment Standards. "We're not in there to make money for the state coffers," he says. "We're not in there to beat up growers."

Former Washington labor inspector Martin Yanez believes the agency has simply failed to enforce the law as it should be enforced. And that, he says, is dangerous.

"If you work those long hours without breaks, even to eat, you are at a point of becoming not only exhausted but exposed to injuries and accidents," says Yanez.

When Yanez worked for Labor and Industries, he would visit dairies at the 5 a.m. shift change. Instead of questioning workers under the watchful eyes of dairy owners, he stood in the road, talking to workers as they arrived and left. But once he began fining dairymen for not giving workers breaks, he says he came under pressure from his bosses to stop. Partly because of this, he left the agency.

In the 11 years since Yanez left, the agency has stepped up its efforts to protect workers, says Elaine Fischer, the agency's spokeswoman. The agency's Web site and publications are bilingual, and in places like central Washington, where the Yakima Valley is located, 34 of its 146 staffers speak Spanish. In 1998, farmworker advocates and Mexican unions accused the state of violating NAFTA and gaining an unfair trade advantage by not extending federal labor laws to farmworkers and not enforcing safety laws to protect apple pickers from pesticides. In response, eight years ago the agency launched a long-term education campaign. These days, staffers visit community events in the Yakima Valley and talk to workers about their rights. Last year, the agency did 19 dairy inspections, far more than any other Western state. Even so, says Fischer, the agency's reach is limited.

"If you're getting paid and if the employer has an accident-prevention plan and there's restrooms and water, there's not a lot we can do," she says. "Sometimes the reality is that the jobs are difficult. People can get injured at work even when there is no safety violation found."

The debate over how well state and federal laws and agencies protect dairy workers no longer matters to Katie and Frank Diaz.

On Dec. 30, 2008, Miguel Diaz, their father, was trampled by a bull as he herded cows away from their pens to be milked at the Tony Veiga Dairy in Sunnyside, Wash. The only witness to the accident was Diaz himself.

After the bull pinned him against a fence and gored his chest, Diaz dragged his tall, thin body to the milking barn. When his coworker, JoseLuis Rodriguez, first saw him, he thought he was joking around, pretending to be injured, according to the Labor and Industries investigation report. Then Rodriguez saw the blood spilling from Diaz's mouth, and the cut on the left side of his eye and face. Diaz gasped for air and was having trouble talking. His boss drove him to the emergency room and left, thinking Diaz would be OK. But within 30 minutes, Diaz's injuries — including broken ribs and a lacerated lung — had sent him into cardiac arrest. The hospital staff failed to resuscitate him. He was 31.

Labor and Industries considered the event a freak accident and did not cite or fine the dairy owner, Tony Veiga, president of the Washington State Dairy Federation. The sheriff's office did not investigate. And the local newspaper did not report the death, aside from a small notice several days later that failed to mention the name of the place where Diaz worked.

Diaz's partner, Consuelo, and his sister, Anna, both hold the dairy liable for letting the bull escape from its pen, for not providing more safety instruction and for not calling for an ambulance to sprint him to the hospital. Diaz had been hurt before in the dairy, when he was caught between two cows that pushed him against a railing. That accident sent him to the hospital with a spinal injury.

Consuelo talks about Miguel's exhaustion from the 12-hour night shifts, how thin he had become, how he mourned the death of a good friend and co-worker who suffocated at the dairy two years ago when a stack of hay bales fell on him. As she speaks, she holds a picture of Miguel with their two kids. Their 6-year-old son Frank has Miguel's warm, serious eyes. Miguel, who was originally from Michoacan, Mexico, moved to the Yakima Valley with his parents and seven sisters in 1988. He was supposed to receive his papers to become a citizen any day, Consuelo says, and as soon as he did, they planned to get married. Miguel thought his boss was a good man, but he wanted to find a better job once he was legal.

"It gets harder every day. I miss him," says Anna Diaz, Miguel's sister. "My parents wanted to give us a better life. They thought it would be better for us here. He had the whole world ahead of him, but he didn't make it that far."

It's hard to determine responsibility for such tragedies; the work itself is inherently dangerous. Miguel Diaz's boss, Tony Veiga, says he is careful at his dairy, holding the state-required monthly safety and training meetings in both English and Spanish. He has an accident-prevention program, also required by law, that instructs workers how to use chemicals safely, how to administer first aid and how to report unsafe conditions. And after 31 years in business without serious incident, he's mystified by the two recent deaths on his farm."I don't know why they happened on this place, as careful as we are, but things do happen in life," says Veiga. "None of us are risk-free. We take risks every day when we go drive down the road or get in a plane. Employers do their part, and employees have to do their part as well."

Inside the concrete milking parlor at the George DeRuyter & Sons Dairy in Outlook, Wash., men with almond-colored skin scramble between the rows of cows, hooking and unhooking udders to milking machinery. Outside, glacier-encrusted Mount Adams rises far to the west, and strains of mariachi music float on the midmorning air from a nearby radio. In the narrow hallway that connects these worlds, third-generation Yakima County dairyman Dan DeRuyter fills a soda machine with Pepsi for his employees, shouting above the grinding motor of the mechanical milking machine.

"I take a huge interest in my guys. If they get hurt, it bothers me," says DeRuyter, whose Dad, George, started this dairy in 1986 with 1,000 cows. Today, they milk 4,600. To protect his 40 workers from getting kicked, he has them milk the cows from the rear through metal crossbars. Taking care of workers makes good business sense, DeRuyter explains: "If you have too many injuries, your (insurance) rates will go up, which is the last thing we need right now." (Dairies can pay as much as 25 percent more in industrial insurance premiums the year following an accident.)

In the past year, a number of forces have affected the price dairymen receive for their milk, causing it to drop from $19 per 100 pounds last June to less than $9 this summer. The European Union voted to subsidize continental dairy products, and Australia and New Zealand emerged from a several-year drought to flood the market with milk just as the general economy plummeted and foreign demand decreased. The cost of production, particularly of feed, has remained high, so most dairies in the West are losing about $100 per cow per month, according to MacDonald, the USDA economist. In the past year alone, the DeRuyters have borrowed over a million dollars from the bank.

"It's like getting kicked in the teeth every single day," says DeRuyter, leaning against the wall. "You wake up in the middle of the night wondering how you're going to pay this off. I'm not sure we can handle these prices for another year."

He's heard grim stories about his peers in California — the farm foreclosures that have happened this summer, and the two suicides that followed. In June alone, 60 dairies in Idaho, Washington, New Mexico and California "retired," turning 44,000 dairy cows into hamburger, according to the National Milk Producers Federation. The Western United Dairymen estimates that 10 percent of California's dairies, big and small alike, will close within the year. Nationwide, it could be more like 15 percent, according to Peter Hoekstra of Genske, Mulder & Co., an accounting firm that handles 450 dairies nationwide. "There isn't a dairy in this office that is showing a profit," says Hoekstra. "These are good people, family farms, not corporations. Some of them have been in business for generations and they're just going to go away."

These hard economic times will almost certainly impact dairy workers. Even as dairy operators worry about insurance premiums escalating, they also have to hustle to stay afloat. That means maximizing production while minimizing costs. Dairymen in Yakima County report that they've cut back employees without selling cows, which means their remaining employees will have to work even harder. The state has yet to calculate workers' compensation claims for the past year (and it doesn't separate dairies from other agricultural industries), so there's no hard data, but injury reports could increase, says Corwyn Fischer, the Washington State Farm Bureau's safety director. "People are trying to prove to their employer that they're a good worker," he says. "They'll think, ‘I need to stay on,' and they work harder and they get injured."

And dairy workers remain at a disadvantage even if their bosses care about them and pay them well. "It's not so much about working conditions as it's about power and what voice workers have in the workplace," says Erik Nicholson, regional director of the United Farm Workers union. Beyond the weighty factors of poverty and questionable citizenship, dairy workers' inability to unionize under the protection of federal law leaves them at their bosses' mercy. The only two dairies in the West that have unionized are in Oregon, where the farmworkers' union was able to rally the public to put pressure on Tillamook Cheese, which purchased milk from the dairies. But such efforts are hampered by the union's lack of resources: It has only four employees for both Oregon and Washington and none in Idaho or New Mexico.

That doesn't mean the organization has stopped trying.

On a golden June evening in Kennewick, 25 miles east of Yakima County, workers from Ruby Ridge Dairy, a 2,000-cow operation in nearby Pasco, gathered around a metal picnic table at a local park. As they piled corn tortillas with green salsa and grilled steak, the men listened to Arturo Sepulveda, a union organizer and fellow immigrant. Intense and compact, Sepulveda spoke about how he and his co-workers successfully fought to unionize the 16,000-cow Threemile Canyon Farms in Oregon, just across the Columbia River. Unionization ensured workers at Threemile paid rest breaks, a pension plan, protection against being unjustly fired and "more dignity," he said. The Ruby Ridge workers passed around a pen and cards and cast votes on forming their own union.

The workers explained in Spanish that they want the union to help them get what is legally theirs but never delivered: lunch breaks, a chance to drink water or go to the bathroom. They don't expect overtime pay or Christmas vacation. As their children ran through sprinklers in the grass, the men shared stories about the conditions at Ruby Ridge, about the stink and the injuries and the long hours.

"A union would be better for the people. The work in the dairy is good, but there's no law in there. The only law is the supervisor," said Jose "Gordo" Miranda. "I'd like to be respected like a worker, right now I'm like a slave. If I get treated bad, I have to take whatever they give me because I have my family to support."

By mid-July, an overwhelming majority of Ruby Ridge's 40 employees had signed cards in favor of union representation, according to the farmworkers union. Nicholson and Sepulveda had met with the dairy's owners and suggested bringing in a neutral third-party to help negotiate unionization. The dairy wasn't interested. Dick Bengen, Ruby Ridge co-owner, says that unionization would cripple his business. If the workers went on strike and refused to milk, he explains, his cows' mammary systems would be ruined within 48 hours. And anyway, he says, his workers don't want a union, based on a vote he had at the dairy. He blames the United Farm Workers for spurring his employees to work less efficiently and less diligently, in order to create a confrontation.

The dairy has fired four people in recent weeks, including Miranda. Bengen says the dismissals have nothing to do with union activity; Nicholson calls them retaliation. In mid-August, 14 Ruby Ridge workers, including those recently fired, sued the dairy. They claim that it didn't pay full wages or provide lunch and rest breaks, and that it unfairly dismissed union supporters. But because the National Labor Relations Act doesn't cover dairies, the fired workers must depend on fairly weak case law, admits Nicholson.

As for Gustavo, when he came to Washington 11 years ago, he never thought about things like unions, or worried about his health. He thought he would become the family hero, helping his parents pay for utilities and his siblings attend school. Now, everything has changed.

He needs a doctor to readjust the metal plate under his eye, but finding someone to do the surgery has been difficult. He works all day, and he's afraid that if he takes time off for an appointment, his boss will jump at the chance to fire him.

"I'm not sure what to do. Tengo un sueno, I have a dream, to watch my children grow and study here in America, but if I lose my eyesight then I won't even be able to work," his says, his voice flat, as his 4-year-old son stands at the doorway, watching. Lately, Gustavo has been thinking about returning to Peru, but his wife, who is originally from Mexico, doesn't want to leave. They fight about it a lot. "Es muy dificil. But I think it's better to leave and be happy and poor rather than to have money and be depressed."

]]>No publisherEnergy & Industry2009/08/24 13:10:00 GMT-6ArticlePaddling toward shorehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/41.9/paddling-toward-shore
The Suquamish Tribe is resurrecting the old ways of Northwestern Indians – particularly their traditional canoe journeys – to improve the health of its young people.Kitsap Peninsula, Washington

Near the shore of Agate Passage, where the silver waters of Puget Sound narrow, five Suquamish girls sit in a circle stringing glass beads. Red, blue, white, blue: A necklace slowly forms. The teens wear dark eyeliner and hooded sweatshirts, but they bead much as their great-great-grandmothers did, 150 years ago. The words of their conversation, however, are harder and sharper than beads, and they are strung on the dark wire of experience.

"She cut herself three times with a paper cutter," says Lauren, age 14. Her hair shines like crow feathers as she casually describes what happened today at Kingston Middle School -- another suicide attempt by a tribal member. "The blood was all dripping everywhere, and then she went to the office."

Sixth-grader Ashley adds that her older brother took a bunch of pills recently in an effort to "suicide himself." Another girl mentions her time in foster care, her mother who lives in Montana and the aunty with whom she lives now. Eventually, the talk rises above such heaviness, turns into teenage giggles about boys, cell phones and the preppy kids at school. But the reality these girls face is tough -- harder than the ground they sit on here, at their tribe's historic winter village in the heart of this scattered reservation.

Young Native Americans today grow up in the shadow of staggering health statistics. Indians are two to three times more likely to commit suicide and six times more likely to die of alcoholism than the general population. Native youth are twice as likely as other Americans to die before the age of 24. If and when they do get sick with a mental or physical illness, the health-care services available to them are mediocre at best.

The Indian Health Service is underfunded and dysfunctional. In late July, congressional investigators discovered that the government agency had lost at least $15.8 million worth of equipment and tried to cover it up by falsifying documents. The report reiterates what is common knowledge: The agency often spends its budget far ahead of schedule and simply can't provide adequate health care.

As a result, the Health Service can provide little more than emergency care and is unable to provide ongoing, quality psychiatric treatment, according to a 2003 report by the surgeon general. Some Native Americans must travel over 90 miles one-way to see a professional; waiting lists can be six months long. Since Native Americans are twice as likely to live in poverty as average citizens, few can afford private health insurance. Government reports describe the state of health care in Indian Country as "inadequate" -- "a quiet crisis." Others use stronger language.

"This is a black eye on the face of the country," says Michelle Singer of the Portland, Ore.-based One Sky Center, Indian Country's first national substance abuse and mental health center. The federal government, she points out, agreed to provide health care to Native Americans as part of treaty agreements. "There's this very wrong perception in America that all Indians are rich because we have these great casinos and shouldn't get funding for our programs, but Indian gaming isn't the panacea. The U.S. has a legal and moral obligation to provide quality and adequate health care to the first Americans."

Yet the lack of funding has inspired some creative thinking. Sick of waiting for federal help, a handful of Northwestern tribes have spent the past several years working to improve young people's health using a novel approach: bolstering immunity to addiction and mental illness with traditional values and tribal customs. A genuine connection to their culture, something that money can never buy, might prove the best defense for Native youth like these Suquamish girls.

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In the southern Lushootseed language, "Suquamish" means "place of clear salt water," which serves as a sort of verbal map to Agate Passage by canoe. For decades, however, the map was lost; federal laws created to assimilate tribes into white culture made it illegal to speak Lushootseed or even carve a canoe. Native children from reservations were shipped off to boarding schools to learn English and Christianity -- to "kill the Indian, not the man," as Capt. Richard Pratt, the founder of one of the first boarding schools, put it.

Most Suquamish children, many as young as 3 or 4 years old, were sent to the Chamawa Indian School in Salem, Ore., nearly 250 miles to the south. If they spoke their language or practiced traditional ceremonies, the nuns who ran the school would slap their hands with rulers, beat them or lock them in the basement, according to Suquamish elders whose stories are now displayed in the tribal museum.

"The thought was to send them far enough away so that they didn't know how to get home," says 50-year-old Barbara Lawrence, whose father was sent away with all 12 of his siblings. Nine of them died at school, most likely from flu and tuberculosis epidemics. Lawrence, whose dad died when she was 4 years old, believes boarding school broke her uncle. "He struggled with alcoholism his entire life. Truly he suffered greatly. He did not raise his children well. But what comes before drugs and alcohol is despair. The truth is, they decimated the culture, and now we have the pieces to pick up."

Though the last of the residential schools closed by the 1950s, their traumatic legacy has been passed down by parents who never learned how to properly care for their children or cope with their experience.

"They didn't learn how to create boundaries, they don't teach boundaries to their kids, there's not consequences for actions and then, well, instead of a 2-year-old having a temper tantrum, you have an 18-year-old raping a neighbor," says Lawrence, her voice collapsing. She believes that her home is one of about three on her block that is alcohol-free. "Multigenerational dysfunction makes it a very scary place to grow up. There's a basic uncertainty in children's lives. Is my mom gonna be happy or sad tonight? Are the lights going to be on or off?"

For Native youth, instability at home is often compounded by the racism that still thrives outside the reservation. Fueled by conflicts over tribal rights to salmon fishing and geoduck hunting, negative stereotyping persists in Kingston, the mostly white community near Agate Passage where Suquamish children go to school.

"These white girls at my school, I used to be friends with them, but they make fun of me and my culture. They said, ‘Natives are so dumb,' " says Cara, 11, looking down at her hands. "I'm a good student, but it made me feel so sad. I don't hang out with them anymore."

Racism makes kids feel separate and erodes their self-esteem, says Chuck Wagner, who grew up on the reservation and who once headed the Suquamish Wellness Center. In the late 1990s, Wagner realized that Suquamish youth, looking for a way to belong, had begun mimicking gang culture. Alcohol and drug use became a rite of passage into adulthood. Wagner was desperate to find a way to help these at-risk kids, but the medical literature only offered programs that had nothing to do with the specific circumstances of rural reservation life and its history.

"We needed something that came from our community," says Wagner. "It's about getting back to the roots of the tribe. It's about sovereignty. It's about the same reason why people in Montana can better manage their lands than someone in D.C. telling them how to do things. We can develop something better right here in the community."

And there, staring Wagner in the face, was a thousand-year-old solution.

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For centuries, the waters of Puget Sound were the highways of the Northwest's tribes. Canoes -- used to fish, travel and hunt whales -- were the tools that sustained life. It requires more than good paddling abilities to steer a canoe through fog, rain and the inevitable swells: You also need the inner strength to manage a stressful journey. Before you harvest the cedar to build canoes, you have to know the prayers and ceremonies to ask permission of the tree spirits. When you travel to other tribes' lands, you must bring stories and dances and songs to share upon arrival. And the kicker: You would never paddle a canoe drunk or high and risk endangering everyone in the boat. Traveling by canoe, in other words, requires the skills necessary to navigate life as a Northwest Native American.

Over the past two decades, in order to reconnect to the old ways, tribes throughout the Northwest have held annual intertribal canoe journeys. In late 1999, Wagner and a handful of other Suquamish joined in the annual paddle; he was struck by the pride and sense of belonging he witnessed in the kids who participated.

"I realized we had this practice that was thousands of years old to keep us healthy. It just hadn't been recorded by the Western world to say, ‘Hey, this works,' " says Wagner, who now lives on Saint Paul Island, Alaska. "But the canoe journey only happens once a year, and we've got 12 months of problems. We needed to keep it going all year round."

Working with researchers at the University of Washington and a grant from the National Institutes of Health, the Suquamish have spent the past three years developing a life-skills curriculum modeled on the canoe journey. The manual teaches communication skills, goal setting, and how to lead mentally and physically healthy lives by weaving in traditional Suquamish stories and cultural values. Kids like Ashley and Lauren learn more than beading; they build drums, identify native medicine plants, and learn the Lashootsee language and traditional storytelling. Each youth also chooses a mentor to help guide her through the rough waters of life.

Before federal and state agencies agree to fund other tribes to adapt the Suquamish framework for developing life-skills programs, the curriculum will need to be scientifically proven effective. Last July, the National Institutes of Health gave the Suquamish and the University of Washington another five years of funding to empirically evaluate it. While it's too soon to know whether the program achieves its desired outcomes -- supporting Native teens' sobriety, confidence and cultural identity -- the academics and tribes involved put great stock in its unique formulation.

"In the past, we saw a lot of helicopter research where researchers would drop in, gather data and leave, never to be heard of again, without taking the time to understand the community or their specific values and traditions," says Lisa Rey Thomas, a scientist at the University of Washington's Alcohol and Drug Abuse Institute. "In this case, we're here to partner with the tribes for the sake of what they think will bring the most benefit."

The Tulalip Reservation nestles on a purse-shaped bay, about a daylong paddle across Puget Sound from Agate Passage. The Tulalip and a half-dozen other Northwest tribes have adapted the Suquamish's Healing of the Canoe curriculum to reflect their own specific stories and artwork.

"This isn't just for Northwest tribes," says June LaMar, a psychologist who helped write both the original manual and adapt it for the Tulalip. "All tribes have stories around journeys that can be adapted. Some, like the Sioux, have horseback journeys. My tribe in California is a high-desert people, and we took annual journeys to the mountains to find food and water to sustain us through the winter. We can fit this framework for other people; we just need to know their stories."

In the meantime, Portland's One Sky Center has posted the various class materials on its Web site in hopes that the framework will be adapted by other tribes throughout the West.

"If we don't learn our culture and values and incorporate them into our life, we won't be a tribe anymore," LaMar says. "That's what this is about. We have to make sure we don't lose that because it's who we are."Native drums and chanting spill out the door of a trailer not far from LaMar's office on the Tulalip. Inside, people gather to prepare for this summer's upcoming canoe journey: An older woman sits at a sewing machine, adults cut vests and dresses from red and black cloth, while a handful of teens and younger kids sort through stencils and hold out their arms to be measured. Shaula, 13, did the life-skills course after school two years ago. Today, she's cutting red fabric for the regalia she'll wear to dance and sing during this summer's journey. Self-assured, she says that even though a lot of kids at her school -- the one off the reservation in Marysville -- smoke pot and take pills, she has no interest in such things.

"It's a thing of pride to be able to say you're drug and alcohol free," says Shaula, as she considers whether to use a sun or hummingbird symbol to decorate her dress. An enrolled member of both the Tulalip and Suquamish tribes, she spends a lot of time after school practicing her dance steps for the ceremonies and training for the long hours she'll spend paddling a canoe later this summer. "When you're involved in cultural activities, you're connected to something bigger than yourself, and it helps somehow. I mean, when you're putting your heart and soul into something, why would you want to mess it up?"

]]>No publisherCommunities2009/05/27 07:00:00 GMT-6ArticleBusted in Rio Blancohttp://www.hcn.org/issues/41.8/busted-in-rio-blanco
Rio Blanco County, Colo., which was just recently buzzing with oil and gas development, now faces an unexpected slowdown as the national economy tanks. The frozen mud in Elaine and Stephen Urie's parking lot still holds the imprint of a prosperity that has faded. Just a few months ago, their flatbed semi-trucks tracked in and out of here daily, maintaining roads and hauling rigs and equipment out to natural gas drillers in nearby Piceance Creek. Today, beneath a crisp blue sky, all seven of their semis rest in the mud, facing the highway expectantly.

"We basically have no work," says Elaine, 55, looking out of her office window onto the equipment-littered lot. "It hurts." Since September, they've laid off 10 of their 14 employees, scaling back to themselves and their two sons. "We're facing devastation, and it's coming fast."

This wasn't supposed to happen. Not for a while, anyhow. As recently as last summer, natural gas companies such as Exxon and Williams predicted that they would be busy in the area for at least the next five years, possibly for several decades, drilling tens of thousands of new wells into the tight sands of northwest Colorado.

Then the economy tanked. Suddenly, manufacturers needed less electricity and therefore less gas in their power plants. This largely explains why gas prices hurtled from $13 per thousand cubic feet last summer to about $3 per thousand cubic feet, leading companies working in the area to scale back the number of drilling rigs by more than 65 percent. For Western communities that host gas development, the bust compounds the economic strains created just by the recent boom.

"What we have now is a system of energy development almost guaranteed to leave people in small towns worse off," says sociologist Bill Freudenburg, a professor at UC Santa Barbara. "It's resource roulette. Every now and then, it looks like finally we're beating off those pesky enviros and we're going to make it big, oh boy, but by the time you pay off your (infrastructure) investments, the boom has gone bust."

In Rio Blanco County, Deputy Sheriff Corey Dilka bumps up and down over a deeply rutted dirt road that winds past drill rigs, outhouses, and trucks hauling water in huge cylindrical containers. Silver and green pipes snake out of the ground; flames fly from tall metal pipes like flags in the wind. In the valley below, home to the longest stretch of asphalt in the heart of drilling activity, potholes stretch across the entire road. Graded to accommodate ranching, these roads fail under the heavy industrial loads, which can weigh 1 million pounds.

Due to the drilling surge, the Rio Blanco Sheriff's Department responded to nearly 2,000 incidents last year -- up from just over 100 in 2003. The county jail, located on the third floor of a red-brick building in the middle of Meeker, has been over capacity since 2005, something unheard of in its 82 years. Calls to the volunteer fire and ambulance crews have tripled since the gas came to town. Two new trailers took over part of the Meeker elementary school playground in order to house the additional children. Apartment and home rental prices have doubled. With the population influx, the county needs a new water treatment facility and sewer system. Communities affected by gas development are unable to maintain infrastructure due in large part to ineffective state tax policy, says a group of local northwest Colorado governments. Despite the billions of dollars that gas companies working in western Colorado say they've created for the state in recent years, Rio Blanco hasn't been able to cover its costs.

Partly this is because the effective tax rate on energy development is just over 6 percent in Colorado, compared to Wyoming, where the effective rate is 13 percent. There, the state's permanent fund has ballooned to $4 billion. Wyoming's Sublette County, home to large-scale gas extraction, had enough money in 2005 to provide classroom laptops for the entire fifth grade.

The energy policies of the Bush administration, which expedited drilling, simply exacerbated the challenges posed by state tax policies, says Ben Alexander, associate director of Headwaters Economics, an independent research group. When gas development occurs in a rush, it makes it harder for communities to develop tourism or attract second-home owners. Ranchers and farmers, who are the bedrock of rural places, struggle to keep going during a gas boom, as their workers leave for richer jobs in the gasfields. (In Rio Blanco's Piceance Creek, 20 percent of ranchers have sold out to gas companies in the past five years.) Unfortunately, according to Alexander, the kind of economic diversification threatened by drilling is key to minimizing the impacts of the boom times and surviving the busts.

"This unbridled energy development has impaired the future competitiveness of the rural West," says Alexander, who is based in Bozeman, Mont.

Though the energy slowdown will give communities time to make improvements to roads and schools, there's a paralyzing sense of uncertainty about whether to even proceed with such expensive projects.

"The oil and gas companies tell us that they'll be back to drill," says Pat Hooker, Rio Blanco's county administrator. "That's great, but when? Two years? Five years?"

]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryColorado2009/05/06 09:30:00 GMT-6ArticleThe sick and tired Westhttp://www.hcn.org/issues/40.23/un-clearing-the-air
The EPA under George Bush has put the health of Westerners at risk in order to make life easier for big industry. Here's the good news: There are worse places in America to live than the West, if you're concerned about your health. In a 2007 survey by the nonprofit United Health Foundation, nearly all the Western states ranked somewhere in the middle, based on factors such as the number of children living in poverty, access to health care, environmental factors and motor vehicle deaths. Utah, in fact, was one of the top 10 healthiest states. However, other facets of the region's public health -- particularly its water and air -- have deteriorated in the past eight years under the Bush administration's Environmental Protection Agency.

"The political leadership has undermined the agency's independence and scientific integrity. (Secretary Stephen) Johnson has claimed to make decisions based on science when even his own scientific advisors were telling the public they didn't agree with him," says Tracey Woodruff, a former EPA scientist under Clinton who is now a professor of public health at University of California-San Francisco. "EPA's effectiveness has definitely been weakened over the past eight years, and it's caused the public's health to really suffer."

In every state throughout the West, farmers spray pesticides known as organophosphates. These chemicals, which are derived from World War II-era nerve gases, can damage the mental and physical development of infants and children. In the 1990s, the National Academy of Sciences criticized the EPA's regulation of the pesticides, which have been in use since the 1960s and '70s. In response, President Clinton signed legislation ordering the agency to reassess organophosphates by 2006, using modern health standards. Under Bush, political appointees within the EPA (some of whom, such as Elin Miller, head of the EPA's Northwest region, once worked for pesticide companies) sought the approval of the pesticide and chemical industry before making regulatory decisions. According to a letter sent by EPA scientists and risk managers to Secretary Johnson in 2006, the scientists had been "besieged by political pressure exerted by Agency officials perceived to be too closely aligned with the pesticide industry." The letter urged Johnson to ban 20 organophosphate pesticides. Instead, the EPA has approved the ongoing use of nearly all of them, including chlorpyrifos, methyl parathion, and diazinon (the latter two of which are banned in Europe).

The agency has also failed to protect the public from the energy industry. In order to stimulate the flow of natural gas from rock, companies often inject "fracturing" fluids -- secret mixtures of water, sand and chemicals -- into the well bore. Up to 30 percent of the injected fluids, which can contain carcinogens such as benzene, aren't recovered and can end up in groundwater, according to EPA studies. In 2004, the agency declared hydraulic fracturing safe because no state's oil and gas commission had ever found proof that the practice had harmed the public health. But then again, no state agency -- or the EPA itself, for that matter -- had ever directly studied its health effects. "It's a Catch-22," says Wes Wilson, the environmental engineer at the agency's Denver office who blew the whistle on the study. "If the EPA doesn't study the health impacts, then there's no proof that there's anything dangerous happening. It's irrational and corrupt. We used to investigate mysteries, and now we're not." In 2005, Congress exempted hydraulic fracturing from the Safe Drinking Water Act, stripping EPA of its authority to regulate or monitor the practice. This past summer, energy companies tested over 200 water wells within a mile of the gas fields in Wyoming's Sublette County, at the center of the West's gas boom; 23 percent were unsafe for drinking, according to EPA standards, and contaminated by hydrocarbons such as benzene and other pollutants, including sulfates and chloride.

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That's not all. In other parts of the West, drinking water is laced with perchlorate, a major component of rocket fuel. In 2002, EPA scientists determined that a safe exposure dose of perchlorate is 1 part per billion -- roughly the equivalent of a drop of water in a home swimming pool. This was expected to propel a stringent cleanup policy, one that would have cost the Department of Defense -- which is responsible for hundreds of spills -- an estimated $40 billion. But after six years of political infighting between the EPA and the Office of Management and Budget, the EPA was expected to announce in December that it would not regulate perchlorate in drinking water. Instead, the agency would issue a non-mandatory "health advisory" 15 times less strict than its original proposal in 2002. The OMB -- which controls the White House purse strings and quietly wields a great deal of power -- had heavily edited the proposal, eliminating key passages. It had also urged the EPA to rely on computer modeling to calculate the chemical's risks, rather than use the broad scientific data already available, according to EPA staff scientists. The assessment fails entirely to consider how perchlorate impacts infants, the most sensitive population.

If benzene and perchlorate aren't enough to make you hesitate before you down that next glass of water, there's always poop. Owing to a final-hour rule, submitted by the Bush administration on Nov. 19, the EPA will not require permits for "waste management" from over 2,000 large-scale Western factory farms. These Confined Animal Feeding Operations are a dirty business: A 1,000-hog farm produces as much waste in a single day as a town of 2,500 people -- and operations that size or larger are found in every Western state save New Mexico. Stored in massive lagoon ponds that sometimes breach during heavy rains, the manure can spill into nearby rivers and creeks, spreading gastroenteritis, blue baby syndrome or kidney-damaging microbes. A single Washington dairy once accidentally dumped 1.3 million gallons of sludge into the Yakima River. Under the new rules, government can't impose limits or monitor operations until something goes wrong. Such a loophole is characteristic of Bush administration policy, says Eric Schaeffer, director of the Environmental Integrity Project since 2002, when he resigned from the EPA to protest White House political interference. "Any time the Bush administration can offer an exemption, they will, but this isn't good government. Waiting until the water's poisoned before you can act is just goofy."

And when big spills of bad stuff do happen, states will be hard pressed for cash to cope with it. The tax on industry that maintained the Superfund account –– money that would normally pay for cleaning up polluted sites –– expired in 1995, and the account went broke in 2003. Since then, Congress has funded EPA cleanups using general taxpayer dollars, to about 72 percent of the former amount. Every day that the tax on chemical and energy companies goes unrestored, the EPA fails to collect $4 million. Though congressional representatives have attempted to reauthorize the polluter payments, Bush has consistently opposed them. The EPA has slowed work at the West's 228 Superfund sites and cleaned up only half as many sites nationally as it did under Clinton. Congress has not yet stepped in with legislation to restore the tax. In the meantime, people like the residents of Libby, Mont., who live near an old vermiculite mine, will continue to breathe asbestos-poisoned air.

People in Nevada and its neighboring states face a similar challenge. Each year, more than 16 gold and silver mines in Nevada collectively release thousands of pounds of mercury into the air, ranging into Utah, Idaho and parts of California. That's equivalent to the amount produced by 32 coal-fired power plants, but although the EPA regulates such plants under the Clean Air Act, no national rule exists for the mining industry. The EPA doesn't even monitor mining's mercury emissions; it leaves that up to the mines themselves. And industry appears to be fudging the numbers: Preliminary air samples taken in 2006 by scientists from the University of Nevada, Reno, found ambient mercury levels 1,500 times higher than would be expected based on industry reports. Mercury can cause neurological and developmental deficits and is especially dangerous to young children and pregnant women. Over the past four years, environmental groups have repeatedly petitioned the EPA to apply the Clean Air Act to the mining industry. They've received no response. Meanwhile, mercury levels exceed EPA limits in seven water bodies in southern Idaho, as well as in 18 of Utah's rivers and lakes, including the Great Salt Lake. Most mercury exposure comes from eating contaminated fish, and virtually every species of fish tested in northern, western and eastern Nevada far surpasses the EPA limit. Better stick to beef.

]]>No publisherPolitics2008/12/20 21:25:00 GMT-6ArticleFemale farmworkers are the most vulnerablehttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/female-farmworkers-are-the-most-vulnerable
Rebecca Clarren takes a close look at the sexual harassment faced by women farmworkers, most of them non-English speaking immigrants.Under a scorching heat, a group of farmworkers harvests melons from a vast field near Huron, Calif. There is only one woman among the dozen or so workers; she leans into the task, her arms outstretched, her body itself a tool. The bandana around her face and her baggy long-sleeved T-shirt offer a thin protection against the sun. But these clothes, which mask her figure and her beauty, are also her best defense against a darker threat: sexual assault and harassment by her co-workers or boss.

"Women get touched on the bottom all the time or taken advantage of," says Maria Reyes, a former farmworker in California's Central Valley. "It happens so much, it's kind of normal." When Reyes reported to ranch owners that her boss had sexually assaulted her, they did nothing. "I told the owners of the ranch everything, but unfortunately, they don't pay attention to a farmworker woman. No one cares what happens to you; you just come and go like a piece of trash."

The abuse -- and dismissal -- of immigrant women who work in agriculture is epidemic. In a 1997 study, 90 percent of female farmworkers in California reported sexual harassment as a major problem. Eleven years later, those who work with farmworkers say that abuse, which ranges from obscene jokes and sexual innuendo to rape -- affects thousands of women.

Sexual assault and harassment is by no means unique to agriculture, but female farmworkers are 10 times more vulnerable than other workers, says William Tamayo, regional attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, San Francisco District. The vast majority of these women arenon-English-speaking immigrants, lured to the United States by jobs that pay three times the wages available in Mexico or Central America. Still, that's not a lot of money: The average woman in agriculture makes $11,250 a year, saddling her to an exhausting life in which every dollar is precious.

"Most of us when we sit down and eat our good food don't ever consider what these women go through to ensure that all of us can feed our families," says Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union. "It's almost like sexual harassment is part of the job."

The failure of Congress to pass a pragmatic immigration policy or to create legal pathways to naturalization for the people -- many with children -- who have lived and worked in this country for decades, only intensifies the challenges these women face. In the absence of federal policy, some Western

counties and cities have passed punitive anti-immigration ordinances. An increasing number of communities require English-only signage, prohibit renting apartments to the undocumented, and fine or revoke the licenses of employers caught hiring those without papers.

Since 2003, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has doubled deportations and tripled raids and detentions of undocumented immigrants. Some 3.1 million children in America have undocumented parents, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, and the threat of deportation and separation from their families makes women even more reluctant to report sexual assault, says Jeanne Batalova of the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank.

Recently, as a way to mark Sexual Assault Awareness Month, at least 14 cities throughout the West hosted the Bandana Project. Participants decorated white bandanas to show solidarity with those who have spoken up and taken action against sexual abuse. The bandanas were displayed this spring on clotheslines in public places, including libraries, government buildings and universities, with the goal of raising public awareness. Launched last June at the nation's first conference to combat the sexual assault of farmworker women, the initiative was sponsored by a coalition of farmworker groups, emergency responders, lawyers and government officials.

Last year at the conference, an anonymous attendee ripped holes in her white bandana and then sewed it back together with clumsy dark stitches. Across the white broadcloth in a red pen she scrawled, "Yo tengo esperanza y fuerte," Spanish for "I have hope and strength."

"That bandana was really symbolic of a person in the mending process. Even though women mend after they've been assaulted, it's always going to be a mark in their lives," says Monica Ramirez, director of the Immigrant Women's Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Wounds heal; scars never go away. No one should be forced to give up their dignity in order to feed their family."

Rebecca Clarren is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She lives in Portland, Ore., and writes about environmental and labor issues for several magazines.

LESS KNOWN FOR coining the phrase "Si, se puede!" and for her love of jazz, dancing and matchmaking

NUMBER OF TIMES ARRESTED 24

HOME BASE Bakersfield, California

When Dolores Huerta speaks to a packed classroom of teenagers at Clovis High School's Latino Forum in Clovis, Calif., she uses the word "we" 47 times. She talks about what "we" can fight for: more universities, fewer prisons in the area, and the legalization of undocumented farmworkers. She talks about how "all of us" can accomplish this: register voters, write to elected officials. Within 35 minutes, she's covered the history of farmworker policy in the West, argued that everyone should go to college, and encouraged Latina women to celebrate their dark skin. By the end of her talk, Huerta is wiping sweat from her face, her voice hoarse as she leads the clapping group to their feet to shout "Viva!" and "Si, se puede!" (yes, we can!) at the tops of their lungs.

Huerta, a petite 78-year-old with dark, fierce eyes, has inspired people to stand up for themselves for over 50 years. Though she says she was shy as a child growing up in Stockton, another city with many poor families and immigrants here in the San Joaquin Valley, today Huerta is bossy and quick to speak her mind.

"Disagree with me, it's OK. Tell me what you think," she urges the students. "It's why we go to school, right? To challenge things."

A former schoolteacher herself, Huerta quit her job in the mid-1950s to work as a union organizer for less than $5 a week, because she decided the best way to help her students was to make sure their parents made enough money to buy them food and new shoes.

To this end, she helped Cesar Chavez form the United Farm Workers, organizing strikes to obtain better wages and some of the first medical and pension benefits for workers in the history of U.S. agriculture. The UFW also fought to make growers stop using the pesticides DDT and Parathion. Today, the National Farm Workers Service Center, which Huerta helped create, provides 4,300 homes for farmworker families and sponsors nine Spanish radio stations throughout the West.

Huerta credits her mother, a divorced hotel and restaurant owner who fed and housed poor people throughout the Great Depression, for her own drive to help others. That drive, however, has come at a personal cost. Huerta's 11 children grew up traveling constantly, taking part in strikes from Arizona to New York and up and down the West Coast.

"We didn't sit around the dinner table like other families do. Time visiting with my mom was sitting in the car with her while she ran around to meetings," Huerta's 48-year-old daughter, Alicia, says. "My mother often says that just like working out, when your body feels sore, that's how life is. It can be uncomfortable, but if you know that's what you have to do to accomplish your goal, whatever it is, it's worth it."

At an age when most Americans are settling quietly into their golden years, Huerta is still at it. No knitting needles or RV parks for her: In 2003, she launched the Dolores Huerta Foundation, a nonprofit directed by her youngest daughter, Camila. To help fund the organization, which trains community organizers in the San Joaquin Valley, Huerta travels across the country to around 20 speaking engagements per month. In a typical week, she spends only two nights at home. Her ability to maintain such a pace is breathtaking -- even 32-year-old Camila says she can't keep up. Community organizing involves long hours and bad food, and people tend to burn out doing it. But Huerta says she has no intention of slowing down.

"When you organize people, when you bring them knowledge and hope, you raise their consciousness. They start learning about how to pressure politicians, and they see how they can make life better not only for themselves, but for others," she says, driving through the valley's inky night after yet another 11-hour day. Then Huerta does something rare for her: She mentions herself. "I love to see how this transforms people. I think it's so incredible."

The author, a former HCN associate editor, writes frequently about labor issues for national magazines.

]]>No publisherCommunitiesPolitics2008/07/18 11:30:00 GMT-6ArticleGuest workers: Laborers or commodity?http://www.hcn.org/articles/17762
Commentary: states trying to maneuver around feds' failure
to act These Web sites represent the brokers behind
America’s dysfunctional temporary-labor system. For over 20
years, the federally run H-2 or guest-worker program has allowed
employers to import seasonal workers from places like Mexico and
Thailand, as long as there aren’t enough American citizens to
fill the jobs. The special visas provided (H2A for farm work, H2B
for non-agricultural work like landscaping, construction and
service jobs in places like hotels or ski areas) are good for less
than a year, and workers can only stay in the country at the behest
of their sponsoring employer. If the worker is fired for any
reason, or the company runs out of work, the special visa
can’t be transferred to a job elsewhere. Instead, it’s
immediately revoked.

In the past, employers, especially
agricultural employers, have been reluctant to use the guest-worker
system. It’s relatively expensive and prone to the
inefficiencies inherent in shuffling paperwork between four state
and federal agencies. Of the approximately 1.6 million agricultural
workers, in 2007 only around 50,000 were legal guest-workers,
according to the Department of Labor. Though no reliable statistics
exist, most experts say that the vast majority of farmworkers are
undocumented.

Obviously, the U.S. immigration system is
in need of reform. The West’s reliance on a largely illegal
workforce encourages the proliferation of illegal smuggling
operations, which endanger average citizens as well as the migrants
themselves. Federal policymakers have been fantastic at explaining
the need for immigration reform, and totally inept at coming up
with good solutions. Almost all recent proposals, even those
suggested by progressives, insist on the necessity for a vastly
expanded guest-worker program, as well as a sealed border and
mandatory electronic verification of documents at the time of hire.
But this is a mistake: The guest-worker program in both its present
and proposed forms is a blight on our democracy and should be
abolished.

The system is notorious for lousy work
conditions, wage and hour abuses, and a failure to provide adequate
housing and medical care. A recent report by the Southern Poverty
Law Center highlights many of the abuses. Despite existing laws
designed to protect workers’ rights, regulation and
monitoring is terribly limited. There are 6,700 businesses
certified to employ H-2A workers; in 2004, the DOL conducted 89
investigations. State agencies have an even more dismal record.
Furthermore, when abuse occurs, temporary workers have limited
power to enforce the terms of their agreements in federal court.
Under the terms of their visas, H-2B workers, whether in
agriculture or the service industry, have no access to federally
funded legal services. In the absence of comprehensive immigration
reform in Congress, the Bush administration has offered up some
questionable “reforms” of its own for the H-2A program.
But its changes would actually lower wages in many parts of the
country, ease labor protection and housing standards, and erode
some monitoring and enforcement. The Department of Labor, which is
currently reviewing the more than 12,000 comments it received this
past spring, says the new version of the rule published in the
Federal Register by the end of the year.

In the meantime,
states are creating their own guest-worker programs. Arizona is
considering a bill that would transfer most of the responsibilities
of the federal H2 program to state authority, pledging to reduce
bureaucratic red tape. If employees disappear, for example,
employers would have to report them to the state agency in charge
of the program; the employees’ visas would then be
immediately revoked, making them deportable. Already, Arizona
legislators have received calls from politicians in Oregon and
Colorado who want to pass similar bills next year. The Rocky
Mountain Farmers Union is urging legislators in Arizona, Utah,
Wyoming, Colorado and New Mexico to draft legislation in 2009 for
an interstate guest-worker program. The lobbyists say it would be a
good way to pool resources and create regional flexibility.

But giving states the authority to oversee foreign
workers is probably illegal: Immigration falls under federal
jurisdiction. Even if states took over visa administration, the
Department of Homeland Security would still need to conduct
mandatory background checks to screen out criminals and terrorists.
Despite the fact that state legislators and lobbyists know
there’s a good chance their laws might not be upheld, they
see their efforts as a way to push the issue at the federal level.

“We’ve been waiting for Congress to act on a
comprehensive immigration bill,” says Arizona state Sen.
Marsha Arzberger, D, who authored her state’s temporary
worker bill. “This is critical to our economy. Arizona needs
the workers; we’re forcing Congress to do something.”

Arizona’s desire to avoid a labor shortage is
understandable. But the current system -- importing foreign workers
who are denied the rights of legal citizens -- comes dangerously
close to indentured servitude. When a worker’s visa is tied
to a specific employer, that worker loses all power to stick up for
herself. The current system makes it especially hard for poor
people who don’t speak English. These people can’t
vote; they’re hard-pressed to even make themselves heard. If
they speak up about abuses, they’re likely to be deported.
The United States tried this kind of thing before, mixing citizens
and non-citizens; it didn’t work out very well. For too many
years, certain classes of people -- slaves, women, non-property
owners -- were denied their rights and not allowed to vote. Our
nation has spent the past 200 years on a march toward increased
equality. Guest-workers, treated at times more like slaves than
like guests, subtract from such progress.

“This is
a huge step backwards,” says John Bowe, author of Nobodies, a
clear-eyed look at modern labor in America. At the very least, Bowe
says, guest-workers should be allowed to travel between employers.
“If you admit human beings into your social system without
giving them adequate protection, they’re going to be abused.
It’s not a question of if; it’s a question of when and
how bad.”

A Portland-based journalist,
Rebecca Clarrenwrites about the environment and labor issues for
various national magazines.]]>No publisherEnergy & IndustryArticlePlowing under the fields of shamehttp://www.hcn.org/issues/368/17649
Rebecca Clarren talks to migrant farmworker women about a
threat they face every day in the fields: sexual harassment and
assault by coworkers and bosses.Under a brain-scorching heat, a group of farmworkers harvests melons from a vast field near Huron, Calif. There is only one woman among the dozen or so workers; she leans into the task, her arms outstretched, her body itself a tool. The bandana around her face and her baggy long-sleeved T-shirt offer a thin protection against pesticides, dust and sun. But these clothes, which mask her figure and her beauty, are also her best defense against a darker, less tangible threat: sexual assault and harassment by her co-workers or boss.

"Women get touched on the bottom all the time or taken advantage of, " says Maria Reyes, a former farmworker in California's Central Valley. "It happens so much it's kind of normal." Reyes was sexually harassed and assaulted by her boss for years. When she eventually reported it to the ranch owners, they did nothing. "I told the owners of the ranch everything, but unfortunately, they don't pay attention to a farmworker woman. No one cares what happens to you; you just come and go like a piece of trash. "

The abuse - and dismissal - of immigrant women who work in agriculture is epidemic. In a 1997 study, 90 percent of female farmworkers in California reported sexual harassment as a major problem. Ten years later, those who work with farmworkers say that abuse - which ranges from obscene jokes and sexual innuendo to inappropriate rubbing, pinching and even rape - affects thousands of women. Workers in Salinas, Calif., refer to one company as the field de calzon, or "field of panties," because so many supervisors rape women there. In several recent cases brought before federal court in California, women who resisted advances were fired or suspended without pay.

Sexual assault and harassment is by no means unique to agriculture, but female farmworkers are 10 times more vulnerable than other workers , says William Tamayo, regional attorney for the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, San Francisco District. A recent survey in California found that male workers outnumber women in the fields and nurseries by about 20 to one. There is little workplace monitoring. The vast majority of farmworker women are non-English-speaking immigrants, lured to the U.S. by jobs that pay three times the wages available in Mexico or Central America. Even so, that's not a lot of money: The average woman in agriculture makes $11,250 a year, saddling her to an exhausting life in which every dollar is precious.

"Most of us when we sit down and eat our good food don't ever consider what these women go through to ensure that all of us can feed our families, " says Dolores Huerta, co-founder of the United Farm Workers union. "It's almost like sexual harassment is part of the job. A woman can expect that at one time or another she will be sexually harassed by her foreman."

The failure of Congress to pass a pragmatic immigration policy or to create legal pathways to naturalization for the people - many with children - who have lived and worked in this country for decades only intensifies the challenges these women face. In the absence of federal policy, some Western counties and cities have passed punitive anti-immigration ordinances. An increasing number of communities require English-only signage, prohibit renting apartments to the undocumented, and fine or revoke the licenses of employers caught hiring those without papers.

Since 2003, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has doubled deportations and tripled raids and detentions of undocumented immigrants. Many campesinas live here illegally with their American-born children: Some 3.1 million children in America have undocumented parents, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. The threat of deportation and separation from their families makes these women even more reluctant to report sexual assault, says Jeanne Batalova of the Washington, D.C.-based Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank.

This April, as a way to mark Sexual Assault Awareness Month, at least 14 cities throughout the West will host the Bandana Project. Participants will decorate white bandanas to show solidarity with those who have spoken up and taken action against sexual abuse. The bandanas will be displayed throughout April on clotheslines in public places, including libraries, government buildings and universities, with the goal of raising public awareness. Launched last June at the nation's first conference to combat the sexual assault of farmworker women, the initiative is sponsored by a coalition of sexual assault activists, farmworker groups, emergency responders, lawyers and government officials.

"I hope this will help the broader public - people who don't work directly with farmworkers or sexual assault victims - become more invested in the issue, " says Heather Huhtanen of the Oregon attorney general's Sexual Assault Task Force, which is hosting bandana displays at two locations in Salem.

Last year at the conference, an anonymous attendee ripped holes in her white bandana and then sewed it back together with clumsy dark stitches. Across the white broadcloth in a red pen she scrawled, "Yo tengo esperanza y fuerte." I have hope and strength.

"That bandana was really symbolic of a person in the mending process. Even though women mend after they've been assaulted, it's always going to be a mark in their lives," says Monica Ramirez, director of the Immigrant Women's Legal Initiative of the Southern Poverty Law Center. "Wounds heal; scars never go away. No one should be forced to give up their dignity in order to feed their family."

For more information on the bandana project, go to www.splcenter.org.

A Portland-based journalist, Rebecca Clarren writes about the environment and labor issues for various national magazines. The Fund for Investigative Journalism frequently supports her work.

]]>No publisherGrowth & SustainabilityAgricultureEssays2008/04/14 16:45:00 GMT-6ArticleBig stakes surround South Dakota's abortion
banhttp://www.hcn.org/wotr/16691
The writer tells what's at stake when South Dakota votes
on an abortion ban On the outskirts of rural
Menno, S.D., past acres of sunflowers, there's a wooden sign nailed
to a post. It reads: "Abortion, America's #1 Killer." Similar signs
dot roads throughout this conservative state, which is populated by
775,000 people and where just one clinic, based in Sioux Falls,
performs about 800 abortions a year. Depending on the upcoming
election, the state's lone clinic might be forced to close.

In February 2006, South Dakota Gov. Mike Rounds, R,
signed a law outlawing abortion with no exceptions for rape, incest
or a woman's health. It is the most restrictive abortion ban in the
country, though the sale of emergency contraception —
sometimes called Plan B — is still allowed. Following the
legislation's passage, a coalition of local feminist and equal
rights groups decided to try to repeal the ban by placing a
referendum on the Nov. 7 ballot. In just nine weeks, over 1,200
volunteers gathered 40,000 signatures on petitions — double
the number needed — from every county in the state. Now, the
voters of South Dakota will decide whether to uphold or repeal the
ban.

Their effort has significance that reaches beyond
South Dakota. If the referendum fails to strike down the ban, the
law, which is not yet being enforced and which the state's attorney
general has said is probably unconstitutional, will likely head
straight for the U.S. Supreme Court, making it the most direct
legal challenge of Roe v. Wade in over 30 years. A vote to retain
the ban could also fuel momentum in 12 different states that have
abortion bans pending, including Idaho and Utah. This was in part
the South Dakota Legislature's stated intent — to spur a
national movement to ban abortion.

"The law itself is
absolutely fantastic," says Jim Sedlack, vice president of the
American Life League, a group that believes all forms of
contraception kill babies. "There are many groups that have waited
for this to happen, and this is a major step forward. This is the
kind of law we have been fighting for since Roe v. Wade was
passed."

History, however, reveals that banning abortion
has never prevented women from getting rid of unwanted pregnancies.
For the wealthy and the well-connected, a ban in South Dakota would
simply mean a long drive to Denver or Omaha to receive the
procedure. For the poor, a continued ban on most abortions will
mean more unwanted children or an increase in dangerous "coat
hanger" abortions. The Rosebud Reservation in south-central South
Dakota, for example, is the second-poorest county in America, with
an average annual income of just over $7,000. Statistics here can
be shocking; for example, 80 percent of female high school seniors
report that they've been raped. The Legislature maintains that rape
and incest victims still have the benefit of emergency
contraception. Nicole Witt of the White Buffalo Calf Woman Society,
Inc., which runs the reservation's shelter for battered women,
based in Mission, S.D., says that is simply absurd.

"We
have children — girls 10, 11, 12 years old — being
raped by their uncles and cousins," says Witt angrily. "Most of the
time they don't tell anyone; it only comes out when they're
pregnant. They're so traumatized. Forcing them to have a child is
almost like punishing them for what happened to them."

Just days before the election, it's hard to predict how South
Dakotans are likely to vote. The most recent reliable polling data,
released in late July by the Sioux Falls Argus
Leader, found that 47 percent of people surveyed said
they would vote to overturn the abortion ban. More recently, a
group of 89 board-certified obstetricians and gynecologists across
the state criticized the ban as harming "medical decision-making."

But anti-abortion advocates have been organizing around
this issue for 20 years. Pastors, armed with voter guides developed
by pro-life groups, have been preaching from the pulpit, telling
their congregations to vote to uphold the ban. Native Americans,
with 8.3 percent of the state's population, are considered a
crucial voting bloc, and there is a strong Catholic, Episcopal and
evangelical presence on nearly every reservation.

Back in
Menno, an hour's drive from Sioux Falls, at the local pharmacy,
employee Sharon Sayler, 64, sums up conflict over the issue that I
heard while doing interviews with women and men throughout the
state.

"Just to have an abortion for convenience I feel
is wrong," says Sayler, a regular churchgoer. "But I feel if the
mother's life is in danger, or if rape or incest caused (the
pregnancy), I believe abortion should be legal for that." When
asked how she'll vote in November, she slowly shakes her head; then
she says she plans to vote against the abortion ban.

Rebecca Clarren is a contributor to Writers on the Range,
a service of High Country News (hcn.org). She is
a writer and reporter in Portland,
Oregon.